Sonzai
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: This is a story about a girl who gathered the seven stars of Seiryuu and obtained power to make her dreams come true. The story itself is an incantation. As soon as the page is turned, the story will become the truth, and none but the girl may end it...
1. Part One: Yui

**Notes 23 Jan 2005:** This is the first chapter of Sonzai, the Fushigi Yuugi fic that I have been writing steadily for the last two weeks. I've been rewatching my FY DVDs, and the premise of this fic came to me around the episode 35-36 range. I can't quite explain how or why, and i certainly can't explain how this story kind of wrote itself into being. This is an AU fic set around the end of the series, but it's the end of the series with a twist. 

"Sonzai" is Japanese for "Existence." I got the title from the Takui song of the same name. All said and done, this is a fic about the existence of the Seiryuu seishi - affirming that they did exist, and even through Nakago's manipulations and their own tragedies, their lives meant something.

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

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Sonzai (Existence)  
One:Yui**

It was dark.

Her first thought was that she had overslept, that her alarm hadn't gone off and she was late for school. She panicked. Didn't she have a test today? She was sure she had something - a test, a presentation...perhaps she was missing physics, and there was that packet she had to turn in. Surely Miaka would be waiting for her at the train station, and she'd make Miaka late for-

Miaka.

She jerked upright in the darkness, and for a moment she thought she heard screaming before it abruptly vanished into nothing and she realized she was alone, that it was dark and she was very very cold and very much alive. There had been...blue light, she remembered, and spots swam before her eyes at the memory. What had it been about blue light and...a voice? It had been warm. No, hot...she had been burning...

Hands clenched on the thin blanket and the world shrank to a pinpoint of blackness before widening out again, like perspective on a video camera, smaller and then larger, then smaller again. A burst of light, like fireworks, except all the light was blue and as she squeezed her eyes shut she could see two glowing pinpoints of light gleaming at her through the darkness, and she opened her eyes, gasping, but nothing was there.

She grasped at the memory. There was something about Miaka. Something about...there had been a book, she recalled with effort that made her head swim. A book and something about...

Footsteps.

The hair seemed to stand up on the back of her neck as she caught the sound of feet striking stone, making their way down what sounded like steps. She clutched the blanket to her, scooting as far back as she was able, but her back met hard stone and there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and she did not even know what she was running from except that she was afraid.

A light pierced the gloomy darkness and she squinted. It was only a candle flame, but the light burned her eyes and she looked away. There were light-spots on the stone walls and she blinked rapidly several times before something clicked and she froze.

Stone walls. To her right, to her left. At her back. She swung her head forward, already knowing what she would see there. The bars of a prison cell door rose up stark and black before her, shivering ever so slightly in the light of a torch in the hand of the man who stood there motionless.

"Did you sleep well, Yui-sama?"

"Nakago," she said, though she had no idea where the name came from, how it escaped from her tongue without her conscious thought. It was simply that the name matched the man, as did other things, other memories that made her stomach recoil with the thought, but she did not know why.

A faint smile, catlike, in the torchlight. She wanted to recoil, but there was nowhere to go. "I see you have been well-rested."

"Where I am?" she whispered. "What have you done?"

He laughed, the faint derisiveness in his voice mocking her even as she sat there shivering in the cold and the damp of the cell. "You are being rewarded for a job well done. You don't like your new quarters? Yui-sama."

"A job well..."

He stared at her for a moment, and then the blue eyes held a note of comprehension. "Ah. Don't you remember, Yui-sama? You summoned Seiryuu."

Seiryuu.

The memory came like flashes of lightning tearing through the stormclouds, a blue dragon and a battlefield, and something about honor and sorrow that had been swallowed up in the midst of so much death. Something had happened. Something....terrible had...

_Kaijin._

"I...I can't..."

He waved a hand in dismissal, and she caught a glimpse of golden hair wisping behind his back with the movement. "It matters now. Suzaku is sealed. Their seishi are dead. You did a marvelous job, Yui-sama. I regret that I must...leave you in this manner."

There was something in his voice that left her blood cold, and she made a sudden lunge for him. "Nakago! Let me out of here!"

He had been turning to go, but he stopped, looked back at her, and laughed. The firelight caught his face at just the right angle, and she saw the man whose features had been so familiar to her - the blue eyes and the long blond hair and the arrogant jut of the jawline, but something had changed. There was something different, something wrong.

"I'm sorry, Yui-sama. I can't grant that request." He paused, as if to reflect. "You see, I don't trust you."

"Trust me-!"

And then she realized what was different about him. He was no longer wearing the armor. Instead, there were robes around his shoulders, and a crown, robes and a crown that she had only seen once before when he had taken her to meet the Kutou emperor, when she had...when she had first...

"You bastard," she whispered. "You've killed the emperor!"

"The crown is mine," he said coldly. His eyes bored directly into hers, all pretense of gentleness gone. "The crown has always been mine, and you have given it to me. You've been of wonderful use, Yui-sama, and perhaps one day, you will be of use again."

"Let me go!" she cried. Her frantic steps took her to the edge of her prison and she wrapped her hands around the bars of her cage, hammering and kicking with all her might. The triumphant gleam in his eyes as he watched her was one of victory. "Nakago! You bastard! Let me out of here!"

He did not answer, simply made a gesture, and two guards stepped out of the shadows. There was a crack of something stinging and painful across her knuckles and she let go of the bars with a gasp, falling back to the floor, her hands raw where the whip had lashed them.

"You'll be more courteous to the emperor of Kutou, you whore!"

She cringed away as the guard made to send the whip through the bars again, but Nakago made a curt gesture, and he subsided, replacing the whip in its holster and giving her a nasty grin instead. A sound strangely like a whimper escaped from her lips. Nakago was watching her again. She could feel his eyes on her, but she would not give him the pleasure of staring at her face.

"I'll make you an offer, Yui-sama," he said, the honorific suffix smooth and honeyed on his tongue. "I dislike having to have you here as much as you dislike being incarcerated, I am sure. I can't set you free, for that would be disastrous, and having you languish in here would break my heart."

She said nothing.

"One of my generals has made me an offer, but of course I could not accept for you. You are, after all, my miko."

Miko?

She raised one trembling hand to her lips. There was....something....

"So I thought I would make you a deal. Will you accept the offer of this gentleman, or will you choose to remain here for the rest of your days? It's a long time to wait, you know, and I am not so inhumane as to order your execution."

"Kill me then!" she burst out, slamming her hands against the floor. "What are you waiting for, Nakago? That's the plan you've had for me since the beginning, isn't it? I was just your tool, something to get what you wanted. Well, you've finally gotten it! Isn't that all you wanted? What's the point of keeping me here, then? Kill me and get it over with!"

He made a clucking noise and a whisper of cloth that she knew was the sound of him shaking his head at her huddled, drained, on the stone floor of her prison. "Yui-sama. I can't do that. That would be too easy."

"I hate you," she whispered.

"I give you three days to decide," Nakago said coldly. "I'll be waiting for an answer."

The sound of his footsteps and the clang of the prison door as it shut and the key turned in the lock seemed muffled to her, sounds from far away penetrating the muzziness that was heavy in the air here, something stifling her, making it hard to breathe. She did not stop the tears as they gathered in the corners of her eyes and coursed their silent way down her cheeks, ticking like the second hand of a clock onto the cold ground. She did not care if she cried. She did not care if she died.

Miaka.

She didn't know why she thought of that name just then, only knowing that there was something about her friend's name that made her stomach recoil, but not in hatred and not in loathing. Something had happened to Miaka, she knew, and she had tried to save her, but that had only gone horribly wrong, and now she was here in a prison cell, sitting on the floor in nothing but a threadbare robe, sneered at by a man who she did not remember but whose name and past and motivations and life she knew as if they had been her own.

Why?

She pushed herself up, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her sleeve. Her hands were only a little bruised, it felt like, from the whip, and nothing seemed broken. The skin, save for the backs of the knuckles, was smooth and sound. She felt her way up her arms, across her chest, down her stomach and her legs and then raised one hand to touch her face.

She was not injured.

But yet she hurt all over, like her whole body was a mass of sores and wounds and bruises, even with the unbroken skin that her hands were showing her. This couldn't be. Surely she was hallucinating, dreaming some horrible nightmare, and she would soon wake up in her familiar room to the sound of her father leaving for work and Miaka on the phone wondering where she was.

She curled up into a little ball and sobbed.

The guard found her like that several hours later, lying on the floor of her cell where she had fallen asleep, exhausted, after sobbing and screaming and pounding the walls, shouting for help though she know no one was listening. What a shame, he thought as he slid the tray of food under the bars. He'd seen her around the palace when she'd still been the miko, and he had liked what he had seen of her, although she'd never spoken to him. There had been a resolve in her face then that there wasn't now, as if summoning the god had drained everything away.

Yui woke an hour later to the smell of the cooling meal. At first she was inclined to say she was not hungry, but common sense won out over pride, and she ate everything. She thought briefly that the meal might be poisoned, then decided that she did not care. What would Nakago gain by poisoning her?

The black spaces in her memory yawned open wide, and she pushed them away. It did not matter now that she could not remember. She remembered enough, and even that was almost too much to bear. She thought of Miaka again, of the phantom of guilt between them though she did not know why, and the tears came to her eyes again. Squeezing them shut, she gulped down the last of her rice and retreated back to the hard stone pallet on which she had woken, trying to work out a logical observation to the mess inside her memories.

She was somewhere where she did not belong. That was obvious. How she had gotten here had something to do with Miaka. She chewed on one fingernail, thinking. It was not Miaka's fault, or was it? That did not matter at the moment. The main problem, then was how to get back to the place she had come from, to Tokyo, which this place definitely was not.

The first obstacle preventing her from doing that was this man Nakago, who she most decidedly had known before the gaps in her memory. She had known him, and from what he had said, it seemed she had helped him. She frowned at that, because how would she, Hongou Yui, have helped such a man as that if she had been of sound rational mind?

That didn't matter either, she decided. The first thing she needed to do was escape this prison. Her eyes went to the four sturdy stone walls, to the heavy barred door set at the front, to the too-faint torchlight that was her only source of illumination. There was most likely some way to escape from here if she possessed the technical know-how and the experience of an escape artist, but she was no escape artist. That route was no good. She could perhaps wait and somehow overpower the guard when he came to retrieve the empty tray of food from her cell, but then where would she go? Searching her memory, she had the faint picture of familiar corridors and passages...but no memory of this dungeon. She would be lost and they would find her, and that would be the end of that.

There was one other way.

He's made an offer for you, Nakago had said. She was fairly sure what the 'offer' consisted of, but that did not mean she would have to do such a thing. As long as it brought her freedom from this prison, as long as she could get out of this place, she could escape, perhaps run to...somewhere. It did not matter where.

What is this country? she asked her brain, and it thought for a long while before replying.

_This is country is called Kutou._

It was useless to try and remember anymore at the moment, so she stopped trying and instead thought upon Nakago's words, trying not to think of Nakago's face as he said those words. It was a face that was familiar, too familiar, she thought. She had been used. She would not let them use her again. She was alive, she was able to move, though it hurt to do so. She could still walk. She could say yes to Nakago's command and be gone from here.

_Is that what you want, Yui?_

Yes, she told herself firmly. That was the only course of action she could take, and obviously, Nakago knew that. But did he take her for such a fool that he would think she would simply accept and be done with it?

Perhaps inside those gaps in her memory, she had been a fool, and that was why she had lost Miaka.

The day seemed as long as centuries, and she spent the passing hours curled up on the bench, revisiting memories of school, of her family, of Miaka. Some of them made her smile, some brought tears to her eyes again. What could possibly have happened between her and Miaka? That was the largest mystery of all, because there had never been anything that could have separated the two of them, and she could feel the truth of it looming on the edge of consciousness, that there had been someone who had lied, and the lie had been big enough to drive them apart.

As she clenched her fists at the almost-memory, she heard the prison door open.

She sat up, preparing to see Nakago, but it was only the guard. He looked surprised to see her awake, surprised and a bit wary, but she simply crossed her arms over her breasts and looked at him.

"I won't try to escape," she said. "Tell Nakago instead that I have thought about his request, and I have decided to accept."

The guard looked confused, hesitating as if waiting for some more explanation, but she simply stared at him, and he finally bowed slightly. "I understand," he said. "I will tell him."

She did not wait for him long, and when she heard the clank of the dungeon door open again, saw the flicker of torchlight coming down the stairs, she was ready. She stood at the door of her cell with a confidence in her face that she did not feel, standing proud even though it felt as if her body had been torn to pieces and her legs could barely hold her. She would not think of that. She would not think of that something that had taken her heart and ripped it to shreds. She would not cry now.

"Yui-sama," he said, and before he could say anymore, she held out one hand.

"I've decided to accept your offer," she said. "I know I mean nothing to you, and that my fate matters nothing to you. But I don't see what other choice I have."

Those blue eyes gleamed and she barely suppressed a shiver. "I always knew you were an intelligent woman, Yui-sama." A gesture to the guard, and the prison door swung open. As he stepped into the cell, something came with him, and it felt suddenly as if a thousand arrows had pierced her open, and the world was on fire. She gasped, stumbled backward as the involuntary tears came to her eyes, falling, bracing herself for the impact of hitting the ground before she felt the jerk of a hand on her wrist, holding her up.

"Silly girl," Nakago said, but for the first time she heard something else in his voice besides the ever present sneer, as if by not addressing her by that forced honorific title, he'd freed some obligation from his shoulders. "Here," he said to the guard, passing her from him as if she were some piece of baggage. "Take her up to her old rooms."

She did not remember the rooms in which they left her, but they must have been familiar once. There were several items of clothing scattered about, and at the sight of them in the flickering lamps of the dark room, she knelt, began conducting a frantic search through the trunks that stood against one wall. It was only after several minutes of searching that she realized she had no idea what she was looking for in the first place, but she knew that if she saw it, she would know.

She did not find it.

Everything hurt all over and she was so tired, yet as she slumped against the big four-poster bed, she felt that she could not stop moving, for if she did, the thing that pursued her would surely overtake her and rip her memories to shreds. She could not let that happen, she thought. She needed those memories, because without them, how could she ever get home again?

But finally the exhaustion won, and when she awoke with a start, she realized that the pink light coming in through the window was the rising sun, and she had slept all night.

The palace was quiet.

Was her room guarded? It came to her that she could make a run for it now, before the sun had risen and before the palace began to stir. She began to get up, then stopped. No, Nakago would expect her to do something like that. He had ways of watching her, she knew, though she did not know how she knew. It would be best to wait.

Stretching experimentally, she found that everything hurt less, though the muscles in her neck and back were sore and tight from having been hunched over against the bed post all night. There was no way around that now. The baths were around to the back, she remembered from somewhere, and taking up the first of the gowns that she saw scattered around the clothing trunks left over from her night of frantic searching, she went to find some water.

Nakago came for her when the sun had fully risen above the lip of the valley. That scene from her bedroom window, where valley met mountain met sky, was familiar to her also, and she had spent the time after her bath seated on the window seat staring out at the scenery, wishing that it, at least, had been new and unfamiliar so she could at least take in some of the peacefulness of the morning. But the windowseat was full of disquiet, and her thoughts turned to Miaka again, wondering where her friend was now, if she was also waking up in Tokyo ready for another day of classes and preparing to meet a friend who was no longer in that world.

She slid off the seat as the door opened. Nakago looked very different in the daylight, tall and broad and formidable in his dark royal robes. She shied away from him as he reached out one hand to her, and he dropped it.

"Surely you haven't changed your mind, Yui-sama," he said.

"No," she said barely audibly, "no. It's just...I'm not used to you yet."

One arched eyebrow was all that indicated he understood, and he simply stood there as she looked at him and pretended not to. The old emperor had been a thin man, dark and hunched and generally unpleasant. But Nakago stood arrogantly resplendent in those long court robes, golden hair hanging loose about his shoulders and wearing no crown now. There was still something that bothered her about him, something that took her long minutes to realize. He was no longer wearing the blue earring.

"If you're ready, Yui-sama, we will proceed."

She blinked at him, and for some reason she felt like crying again, though for herself or for him, she didn't know. But that was ridiculous, because why would she weep for a man she hated?

It seemed as she looked at him, that she was only seeing half a man, and where the other half had gone, she did not know.

"Yui-sama," he said patiently, and she looked around the room that had once upon a time been hers, and nodded.

"I'm ready."

She had expected to be taken to the throne room, but the room to which he escorted her was not the throne room she remembered in her bits of memories. This room was modest, lined with shelves of scrolls and other literary texts, and the lord seated in the chair was not as sleazy as she had pictured him, but she had no doubt he had something shady in mind for her.

That didn't matter, she reminded herself. As long as she could get out of the Kutou palace, it didn't matter what he had planned.

"This is Lord Chin," Nakago said from beside her, and the lord rose from his chair and bowed respectfully. "Lord Chin, our former Seiryuu no Miko. I release her into your...care."

She heard the hesitation before the final word, saw the look pass between the two men and clenched her fists. "I hate you, Nakago," she said again, and heard him laugh as she whirled, turning her back on him fury. She would not do him the honor of looking at his face before he left her.

"You're out of my hands," he replied, and she noticed how he did not use her name altogether, as if by eliminating the sound of it he was cleansing her from his memories, from his country, from his very life. "Farewell."

The door slammed.

She stared at the short, fat man in whose hands her life lay now, wondering what on earth he could gain by taking someone like her into his custody. He stared back at her, fat, ringed hands stroking the sides of his robes absently, and she felt herself hate him immediately, without knowing anything of him or what he had come for. He had shifty eyes, she noted with distaste. Shifty eyes and the countenance of someone who could not be trusted.

Just like Nakago.

"Well, Miko-sama," Chin said at last, smiling wide and showing black, rotted teeth. "If you would do me the honor of accompanying me."

"Where do you think you're taking me?" she demanded.

"You'll see," he responded, reaching out one hand to grasp her arm, and she slapped it away. He looked faintly surprised at the fact that she was capable of defending herself, pitiful though the attempt was. When he reached out again, it was with the same look of distaste on his face as she was sure she had on his, and his grip was like iron. She cried out as his fingers clamped around her upper arm, and she heard him laugh.

"Don't try to fight me, Seiryuu no Miko. You've won in your arena, but this is mine."

She learned all too soon what his arena was, as he dragged her around the back corridors of the Kutou palace out to where his caravan of several pack mares and mutinous-looking servants were waiting. No one tried to stop them. She would have cried for help, but there was something about the atmosphere of the palace through which they tread that seemed to forbid it. The air was heavier here than she remembered, hushed and oppressive, like the coming of a summer lightning storm, leaden and full of secrets.

It was easy to imagine that besides the two of them moving through the palace corridors, there was no one else left alive here.

But the weather outside was that of a crisp, cool fall day, and she stood without complaint as one of the servants bound her hands behind her, forced her onto the back of one of the pack mares, and they set off through the wide gates. She ignored the wide eyes of the gate guards, looked resolutely forward and focused her eyes on the point where the road narrowed and shrank to nothingness through the streets of the city. As the gates groaned closed behind them, she did not look back.

They passed through the city and to the upper ground beyond the capital, and the wind through the grass that should have calmed her only made her cold and jittery. They traveled the entire morning, stopping only to water the horses, and she sat quiet and still during the break. There were no prison walls around her, nothing to hold her back, but she felt simply very tired and empty, with a throbbing behind her eyelids that was threatening to break open her skull.

Lord Chin's camp was half a day's ride from the capital, small but efficient, wagons arranged in a circle with watchfires all around and sentries ringed around the few tents that were still standing. Wooden circles of stakes were all that remained of what had obviously once been other tents, and the air was alive with the bustle of breaking camp.

"It's good to see you back safe, Lord," said the sentry who hailed and halted them as they drew near, and Lord Chin said something that Yui could not catch, which was most likely to do with the time they were due to move out. The sentry glanced at her curiously as they passed, but did not comment.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked the Lord's fat back astride his horse, the first words she had spoken all day since leaving the palace, and he smiled, again showing his black teeth.

"Sairou."

The words took a moment to fully form inside her mind. Sairou was a country, her brain told her. A country...but not this one.

"Sairou?"

She grasped the full meaning of his words too late as he dismounted and dragged her off the horse with him, handing her roughly to one of the sentries standing guard, saying, "put her with the others." The "others," she found, were all bound with their hands and feet in loose but heavy manacles just as she was, huddled together within the wagons that had been at the center of the camp, because it was natural to put one's most precious goods at the center of one's camp, and that was what she had become.

She held nothing against Nakago for giving her to a slave trader. It was, she supposed, the most prudent thing he could have done. In Sairou, she would be out of the country and out of his way, and if she lived, it would be as someone else's property, and if she died, it was no blood on his hands.

Something broke inside of her for a split second as the door to the wagon slammed and she heard the shift of warm bodies inside the wagon as they adjusted to the presence of someone new among them. She wanted to cry for Miaka, but Miaka was not there, and even if she was, how could she help now?

"You from the northern villages too?" someone said, and it was several seconds before she realized the voice was talking to her.

"N-no," she stuttered. Talking seemed very difficult, and her mouth was woolen. "From the capital."

"Ah," the voice responded, and said no more as the wagon began to move.

The first night she passed alone in the corner, with no one offering a word of comfort. She didn't blame them. How could they, they who had been cursed to share the same fate? She didn't know how it should be with the prisoners of a slave wagon, but she heard murmured conversations and saw, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, that even here there were groups of people, alliances and friends, in which she was a sole island. Perhaps it was only because she was the new girl, or perhaps it was because they saw something in her they disliked. Again, she didn't blame them. Not even she understood the scars she carried, but if she had been anyone else, she would have shied as far away as she could.

The second evening, she had been shivering alone in her corner as the wagon bumped over rough stone, listening to the rough voices of the men outside driving the caravan, when someone spoke in her ear.

"Would you like a blanket?"

She jumped at the unexpected nearness of it, and when she turned to look she could make out nothing of the speaker's features in the half-light. But the voice was low, soothing, and she nodded hesitantly.

"Thank-thank you."

"Don't mention it," it said, and then it was gone again.

The blanket was rough and scratchy, but it was warm enough for the cold night, and as she wrapped herself in it that night she wondered if her mysterious benefactor would be cold. Around her, a mass of other warm bodies lay dozing, and she wondered who among them was the one who had taken pity on a stranger girl. She regretted having taken the blanket before asking for a name.

The wagon traveled for a third day, a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, and the mysterious voice did not speak to her again. The doors opened at regular intervals and some guard would throw in food as if they were dogs, but she was so hungry that she did not care. There was some sort of system within the wagon that she did not understand, but the food was distributed evenly, and she ate her portion in silence, wondering when the journey would end. They must be out of Kutou by now, she thought. The air through the tiny windows had grown increasingly dry and uncomfortably hot, and they had not stopped travel at all, not even during the night. Sairou lay to the west, she remembered, opposite from Kutou to the east, and it seemed to her that they had been traveling for a long time and would never stop.

The sixth night, they were attacked.

She did not remember what awakened her, but her eyes jerked open only a second before shouts filled the air, and she sat bolt upright, clutching her rough blanket. The other prisoners around her were awakening now, too, murmuring among themselves, and then something exploded violently against the side of the wagon, and she screamed. The wagon teetered for a long moment as she felt herself and the others around her slide helplessly to one side, and then she felt the vehicle groan around her as it fell a long, long way to the ground.

Her head hit the floor with the impact and she lay, stunned, feeling that she must have died and wondering what was taking so long, but at last the lingering haze cleared and she realized she was not dead, that the wagon had toppled over and that the night air was rushing in through the suddenly open doors.

A collective shout, and she pushed herself to her knees as the wagon rapidly emptied, prisoners shuffling as fast as they could through those doors, clanking of arm and leg irons loud through the crackling of fire from outside. She tried to stand, but her robe had somehow gotten tangled in her manacles, and she slid helplessly to the ground. Her arms were so heavy.

The air had grown hotter, she realized, and as she tried to breathe and instead coughed through the sudden influx of smoky air, she saw that everything had grown hazy, little sparks shooting up before her eyes and exploding like fireworks. She could not move. She could not even crawl.

"Miaka," she gasped, one hand working feebly against her side, knowing she had to get out, get out! before the fire consumed her, because it was a fire, and if she did not get out before it reached her, she would die. "Miaka...help me...Mia..."

The roar in her ears might have been from the fire sweeping into the place where she had been, or maybe it was from the throat of the one who snatched her up gently in a grip that nevertheless felt made of iron, to bear her up and out of the wagon which groaned again and then collapsed in a shower of sparks and smoldering wood and metal. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of cool night air mixed with the stinging of what were most likely charred bits of fire cinders caught in her eyelashes, and did not speak as she was carried away from the camp, away from the glowing destruction of the slave trader's worldly possessions, and it did not hit her until they stopped, swaying, that she was free.

She would have opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly she was falling, and the half dirt, half brush ground in which she landed bruised her hip so that she rolled over, moaning at the pain. She caught a glimpse of her rescuer against the foliage then, but there was no moonlight, so all she saw was an indeterminate shape looming up against the silhouette of trees and stars.

"Who are you?" she whispered, but the other simply paused and then was gone, a whisper of night wind.

She pushed herself to her feet and staggered forward.

She did not know how long she walked, only that the hem of her robe was torn and muddy and ragged by the time she came to the river, only that the first light of dawn was beginning to show and that she had lost one shoe, that the metal manacles were cutting into her arms and legs and that her ankles and wrists were raw with the chafing. She had heard the sound of water from a long way off, and that alone had encouraged her to walk on, because all she had seen after leaving the little wood in which she had been deposited were hard rock cliffs and the wind whistling through unseen canyons.

The banks of the river had once been property of one such canyon, but millennia of water rushing over its banks had gradually worn the rock away, and she felt dry, crumbly dirt between the shoeless toes of her right foot as she dragged herself to the river's edge. There were small plants here too, fern and weeds and even some tiny flowers. She had never been so glad to see flowers.

She stared at the sluggish river water, looking down into its muddy depths, then toward the horizon as it flowed on, swirling currents heading toward some unknown destination. She could follow it, she thought, and see where it led. But the thought of Lord Chin and his caravan turned her head as she scanned the landscape behind her. It was safe to assume that everything had been destroyed in the attack and the fire, though who would attack a slave trader, she did not know and did not care to guess. If she stayed on this side of the river, she put herself in danger of being followed.

No, she had to cross.

She shuffled down to the bank and put first one foot, then the other in the water. It was cool to her sore feet, and she smiled at the refreshingness of it, as if she had never seen water before. It was shallow enough here, and she could wade for a distance to see if there was any sort of bridge where she could cross. The manacles on her hands and feet were too heavy for her to risk swimming, but it would be nice to walk through the water.

She had taken two steps when she realized she was thirsty, and she knelt to drink.

Thinking back on it later, she wasn't certain if it had been the leg irons that had dragged her under, or if she had just been so exhausted and weakened by lack of food and water that she had not been able to stand up to the rushing of the river current. The water pounded at her and she barely had time to scream before she was pulled under.

Everything was eerily quiet and blue-green under the river surface, and she tried to struggle before she realized that she could not even do that, because the metal links binding her wrists and ankles were too heavy. As she sank, she opened her eyes, gazing blurrily at the daylight rapidly fading above her, spiraling down to the bottom, and then she thought of Miaka again. Save me, she thought, but the words vanished too soon in her mind as spots began appearing before her eyes, and there was no mysterious benefactor to soothe her this time, no strange rescuer to bear her out of the blue tomb into which she was sinking. There was not even Nakago.

It was a strange hallucination of the drowning, she thought to herself, that made them think they were being rescued. She fancied there were two arms around her, a strong force drawing her upward, but the light was growing dimmer, and she could no longer draw a breath. The water rushing down into her lungs strangely did not frighten her. She had faced death so many times that it was no stranger to her now.

But instead of the soft bottom of the riverbed, she felt harsh, prickly grass under her back, and someone was shaking her. She tried to shake her head. No. She wasn't going to get up. She didn't want to be rescued. It would be better for her to just die.

"Oi," said someone. "Miss. Wake up."

No, she tried to say, but the word was interrupted by a great fit of coughing, and she doubled over on herself as the water rushed out of her lungs and empted itself in a rush onto the shoes and pants of the person who knelt beside her. He backed away hurriedly, but not too much, she realized hazily, because as soon as the coughing subsided he was beside her again, one hand on her shoulder and another patting her back.

"Can you speak?"

She coughed again. "What," she began. Her voice rasped in her throat. "Where?"

"You're safe now, miss," the voice said soothingly. "I saw you on the other side of the river as you stepped in...that wasn't very smart of you, you know. With your hands and feet like that. It was obvious you weren't going to make it. This river has a nasty sort of god playing in it, and he likes his pranks a little too much sometimes."

She tried to move one hand and her arm gave a sort of floppy twitch that reminded her of a dead fish. "I hurt," she said instead, and her rescuer moved one arm to support her head as she pushed herself upright, balancing herself on his knee and managing to sit up.

"You look like you've been through an ordeal," he said in return. "Can you stand? I'll take you to my parents' house. We don't live far, and we've an extra bed or two."

"I don't want to-" she began, and she felt him shake his head.

"It's not an option. You look half dead."

She tried to laugh a bit. "I feel half-dead. I guess I am."

"Come on," he said. "We'll go home and get some food in you, and some medicine, and then you can sleep a bit and you'll feel better." Leaning down, he reached out both hands to her, and for the first time, as she reached out her own hands, she looked up at his face.

The blond hair, the light eyes, so wide and trusting, the familiar shape of the face that stared down into her own she had seen a thousand times in her dreams and a thousand times waking, had longed to see again just one more time and did not even know it till now. But this had to be some sort of nightmare, because he was dead. She had felt him die, had seen him die over and over again.

"Oh gods," she whispered, one hand moving to cover her mouth. "Suboshi. No. You...you're dead."

The handsome face blinked at her, the forehead puckering into a slight frown, then something passed over the boy's expression, a struggle of emotion as if there was something familiar in her words that he should know. "I'm sorry, miss, you must be mistaking me for someone else," he said politely, offering his hand again a little hesitantly. "My name is Kaika."


	2. Part Two: Kaika

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
_

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Sonzai (Existence)  
Two: Kaika**

It was good that he had taken the precaution to bind the horse's rope bridle around her waist, because before they were even five minutes into the ride home, the girl had fallen asleep, slumped against the horse's neck as it plodded on. The locks to the chains that bound her hands and feet were crudely made, and it took only a few twists of his knife to set her free, but she had been in no condition to walk.

The sun had barely risen above the horizon, but already it was hot. Kaika shielded his eyes against the sun with one hand and stroked the horse's neck with the other. It whickered, tossing its mane in an attempt to imitate, perhaps, some majestic steed. All it succeeded in doing was to toss the girl nearly off its back, and Kaika let out an indeterminate shout, whacked the horse with his free hand while doing his best to haul the sleeping body back onto the saddle in front of him.

It was strange, he thought, staring at the back of her neck, the soggy, dripping wet hair soaking the collar of her dirty gown. She'd looked at him then as if she had known him, had spoken a name to him in a voice that had been almost desperately pleading, as if she had wanted him to say yes, I am that person.

But he wasn't.

The strange sort of twinge came again at the memory of her voice speaking that name, and he shook his head briskly, urged the old horse into something resembling a trot, and focused on counting the birds he saw on the way home.

Thirty nine and three-quarters bird later (the other quarter had obviously been run over by some cart and taken away with the wheels) the horse reached the edge of the village. Kaika pulled it to a halt with gentle hands on the rope. He could hear the clucking of chickens somewhere in the background against the buzz of the morning insects calling, and as he wound the bridle tighter around the sleeping girl's form, he heard the slam of a door, villagers' feet pattering.

"Back already?" said someone, and he looked up as the village medicine man came into view, his white hair and beard as wild as ever, water jug strapped to his back and cane tap-tapping along the packed dirt road. He bowed.

"Good morning to you, teacher."

The medicine man stopped, and sharp eyes peered at him, then his horse. "That's no rice sack you have there."

"She fell in the river," Kaika said, feeling rather uncomfortable at having to explain a girl tied to the back of his parents' horse. "I thought she'd like somewhere to dry off. You know."

The man raised one eyebrow but didn't comment. "Tell your mother I have her medicine ready," the old man wheezed after a second. He raised his cane, then looked back, and Kaika braced himself for another comment about his passenger, but the old man simply shook his head and hobbled away with surprising speed.

On the horse's back, the girl shifted slightly, and Kaika tugged at the animal's bridle. It lurched into a walk and he heaved a sigh, reached out with one gentle hand and placed it on the girl's waist as they made their way towards home.

His mother was already awake when he came through the front door with the girl in his arms, and he saw the look of surprise and concern cross her face as she saw the sleeping form he was cradling. But this was not the first bedraggled, drowned human being he had brought him before - there was a little boy before this who had jumped into the river after a lost toy and couldn't swim, and then a month or two before, a girl child who had somehow fallen in when her parents were not looking. And then there was the dog, and the two cats, and the bird he'd found with a broken wing. A kind heart, his mother said, and he wondered at the sad expression that crossed her face whenever she uttered the words.

It did not matter that this girl was older, about his age, really. "I found her in the river," he said, though he knew that was obvious from the way the girl was dripping all over the clean stone floor of the entryway. "Can you spare the extra bed, mother?"

His mother was already bustling in with clean sheets. "Your father's out this morning," she said. "But when he comes home for lunch I'll tell him to go fetch some medicine. The girl looks like she has the beginnings of a nasty cold coming on."

"How can you tell?" Kaika wondered, impressed.

His mother smiled. "The color of her cheeks. It's not hard." She gave a final tug on the sheets. "Freshly washed, though you might want..." she stopped. "Go tend the pots for me in the kitchen, will you? I need to get these wet clothes off the girl before she catches something else."

Kaika mumbled something and ducked quickly out of the bedroom entrance, easing the door shut behind him, and spent the next twenty minutes absently stirring his mother's soup pot over the wood fire and wondering darkly what was taking her so long. It seemed that whole days had crawled by before she emerged from the room, wiping her hands on a soft cloth and giving him a smile.

"She's sleeping soundly," she said, then gave him a look as he started eagerly for the bedroom. "I'd let her sleep. She's exhausted, the poor thing. What's her name?"

"I didn't ask," Kaika said, feeling self-conscious and for some reason, uncomfortable under his mother's perplexed gaze. She had opened her mouth to ask him something else, but he did not let her begin to speak the words, flung open the door of the house and stalked out.

He would have explaining to do when he returned, but he did not care, he thought, trudging down the back path down to the place where the grass gave way to brush and then to dirt hill, and he stomped up the hill, knowing he was being childish and reveling in it for once. The sun burned its way across his neck and he was sweating as he reached the top of the hill, stood there and felt the cool wind on his face, looked across to the horizon and seeing hill after hill swell in the sunlit landscape like doubling illusions. He followed them with his eyes as far as he could, watching till the hills lengthened, heightened and became mountains farther to the north, and then to the south, where they became cliffs.

There was something important about those cliffs that he could not remember.

He let his legs collapse under him and he sat down with a thud. Dust displaced by his arrival puffed up around him and he coughed, rubbing his eyes and nose. He wished he had brought his flute so he could play, but that would have required that he had some free time, and this was not his free time, he thought guiltily. His mother would want his help with the boxes in the back, and his exit from the house had not exactly been pleasant.

His bursts of temper had been more frequent in the past few weeks. He didn't know where they came from, didn't know why he would suddenly become upset or fly into a rage over things that had never once before attracted his notice. It was worrying his parents, he knew, and more than once his mother had suggested that maybe it was time he struck out on his own, started an apprenticeship with the smith or the potter, and he had refused. It was just to get him out of the house, he accused her. He wasn't going to be pushed out of his own house.

She had looked at him with those sad eyes, and then he would stalk out the door, knowing that they both knew what neither of them would voice: this was not his house, nor could it be his house forever. His footsteps would take him to the top of this hill, and he would sit here, sometimes in silence, sometimes with his flute, sometimes meditating, sometimes raging silently until there was nothing left and he was exhausted.

When he came home, his parents would act as if nothing had happened, and the feeling of tension would ebb, slowly, out of the air. He didn't know if they remembered, or if they hoped that it was just another teenage stage, that he would grow out of it.

He didn't know how to explain that it wasn't something he could grow out of. He didn't know how to tell them that one day the rage had not been there and the next day it was.

Some things were better left unsaid.

He sat there on the hilltop until the sun grew almost unbearably hot, even for someone who was used to it, and then he stomped heavily down the slope again. When he ducked back inside his house, his mother was washing some vegetables in the wooden tub next to the fire, and he waited for her to ask him why he had been angry.

But she said instead, "Your father's home. How about you go help him in the yard?"

"Yes, mother," he said, for there was nothing else to say.

They ate lunch in near silence, as they always did. His parents were not great talkers, and neither was he, and it suited them that way. The only thing said during the lunch was when his mother got up to check on the girl in the bedroom and came back to report she was still sleeping and had a slight fever, but nothing that could not be cured with a little more rest and some medicine.

His father left again after lunch, promising to return with the medicine, and he spent the rest of the afternoon running errands, drawing water and finishing some of his father's construction projects for the garden in the back. He had erected the clothesline rack and was tacking down the last stake when his mother announced dinner. The girl had not awakened yet, even after they had eaten, and his father poured some of the medicine into her mouth as his mother washed the dishes. He watched as her throat worked to swallow the bitter potion, as she shifted a little in the bed. His father tipped the jar again, but before the drop of medicine could pour from the lip of the bottle, the girl turned over onto her side and the medicine splashed onto her cheek instead.

"Sorry," Kaika said automatically, and reached out one hand, but his father laughed.

"And why are you apologizing for a sleeping girl? Hold this for me-" he pushed the jar into Kaika's hands, "-while I go get a towel."

He remained sitting on the chair after his father disappeared from the room, watching her sleep. She did not look peaceful at all, he thought. Some people managed to look peaceful while sleeping, but she had something akin to a frown on her face, a grimace, as if she was seeing a dream she did not want to see. As he watched, she swallowed again, and then with a start, he realized she was crying.

He reached out one finger to brush the tears away before he even knew what he was doing, and as he froze in midmotion, she said in a clear voice, "Suboshi."

He fled the room as soon as his father returned, hearing his surprised voice calling after him, "Kaika! Where are you going?" But he could not answer, did not even know where his legs were taking him, only that he had to run away from the room in which that girl lay, as if by placing as much distance between her and himself as possible, he could escape that knot of blankness that lay pulsing with him.

His breathing was ragged when he finally slowed to a trot and found himself almost to the edge of the village, where the village water well squatted quiet and undisturbed in the evening light. He stopped, smelling the scent of rain in the air, which was a surprise in itself because he could count the number of times it rained in this place during early autumn on both hands. His mother would like that, he thought dully to himself. She did not like to have to go to the river to draw water when the well dried up.

She's not your mother, his mind scolded him, and he pushed down on the knot, willing it to go away, wanting it to go away. He should go home. He did not want to go home, but he would have to go home eventually, and perhaps the girl would be awake and he could demand to hear from her own mouth who she was and what memories she bore that tormented his.

He had almost passed the well when he realized that he was not alone.

"I hear there's a girl at your house," the stranger began in a familiar tone and he whirled around, hand grasping for the knife he usually carried at his belt when he went out after dark. But he'd left it at home because he had not been planning to go out tonight.

"What business is that of yours?" he demanded, and the stranger laughed, a low laugh.

"None of mine, really. I was just passing through, a traveler. I like to hear news of travelers like myself."

He clenched one fist, but the stranger made no move to come towards him, and he forced himself to relax, wondering where this strange urge to attack had come from. "What about it?" he heard himself saying.

"Is she doing well?"

"She's sick," he said defensively. "But she's getting better. You don't need to know about it."

"Maybe I do, and maybe I don't." The stranger's dark cloak fluttered in the wind and he realized that the sound he heard in the distance was thunder. "Is she from Sairou?"

"I didn't get to ask that much," he mumbled. There he was, acting childish again to someone he didn't even know. "I don't even have a name."

The stranger laughed softly again, but this time the laugh was much more high-pitched, gentle and soothing, and he realized with a start that he was talking to a woman. "Ah, such is the pity. Her name is Yui."

Before he had the chance to even gape, there was a rustle of cloth and the tinkle of that laugh again, and the stranger was rising from the edge of the well, turning to go. The way she moved, the sound of her voice...he fancied that there was somewhere he'd seen it before. He could even think, if he pretended hard, that he had seen her before, and if only the sun had been out in the sky, he could have placed her in the memories which he did not have.

"Wait!" he cried, but all the response he received was a raised hand, an almost invisible wave, and as he took a step to dart after her retreating back, the rain broke over him in a growl of thunder.

His mother again did not say anything as he stood dripping on the floor of the front entrance, simply offered him a towel and told him to go clean up after himself. He accepted gratefully, biting back words which he knew had no place as answer to the kindness she was showing him even after he had behaved so disgracefully as a son, and moved to the bedroom to soak up the water from his hair.

The girl was awake.

He saw her sit up as soon as he walked in, and his every instinct told him to get out of that room. But there had been too many strange incidences tonight, and he'd be damned if he was going to run out of the house again, especially during a thunderstorm. "How do you feel?" he said.

A strange look flitted across her face as she caught sight of his face in the candlelight, and he peered at her, wondering if she might say something that would explain everything, but she just winced a bit as she lifted a hand, stroked the back of her neck. "Horrible. But alive. Thanks to you."

"It wasn't much," he said, feeling embarrassed. "My mother said you'd have a slight fever for a day or two, but you seem to be recovering nicely."

She smiled a real smile at him this time, and to his horror, he felt his face grow hot. He turned away from her abruptly, making a show of rubbing his head and shoulders with the thin towel to hide his blush. "Where are you from?" he said instead.

Her silence made him turn around and look back at her. He found her staring at her hands, rubbing her fingers along the red welts made by the manacles which had been around her wrists, as if they would give her an answer. "Kutou," she said at last.

A strange sort of shiver ran down his spine at that name, but he ignored it as best as he could. "You're a long way from home."

She grimaced. "It's a long story. I'd rather not tell it at the moment. I..." she trailed off, and whatever she had been going to say went with it. "Your parents have been very kind," she said instead. "I don't know what I would do if you hadn't brought me here."

He felt the beginnings of another blush, and rubbed his eyes. "Please don't mention it," he said politely. "As I told you, that river can be a little precocious sometimes. You're not the first we've brought home, though you are the first person that's been from beyond the country borders."

"You said your name was Kaika?" Her voice was abrupt, too abrupt. He stared at her and as she met his eyes, he suddenly felt as if there was someone else in the room with them, someone who he could feel but not see. But that was absurd. He was here and she was here, and his parents were out in the kitchen, and besides them, there could not be anyone else in the there?

"I'm Kaika," he said with some effort, wrenching his eyes away from hers, thinking that if he did so the spell would be broken, but it was not. The feeling of someone there remained, and there was something else, the feeling that she carried with her much more than met the eye. "And you are?"

"Yui," she whispered. "Hongou Yui."

"That's a nice name," he said hoarsely, and as he did so he had no choice but to look into her face again. To his surprise, he saw fear there.

He took one step towards her, hardly knowing what he was doing, and then another, and then he was kneeling at the side of her bed. She stared at him, her eyes huge and dark as the candle flame flickered across them, and then, trembling, she reached out a hand, placing it in his upturned one that lay limply on the coverlet of the mattress.

"Subo-" she murmured, and he reached out and took her in his arms, crushing her to him tightly without knowing why he was doing so, without knowing why it was that his heart leapt within him as he held her and she sobbed into his shoulder.

They remained that way for a long time, and several times his mind broke clear of the haze to wonder if his parents might be coming in to bed. But they did not come, and she was warm against his chest, her breathing ragged in his ear, and he closed his eyes and smelled the scent of her that was somehow familiar, although he knew he had never seen her before.

He knew that she was about to speak when she turned her head. He made to stop her, and she shook her head, pushing slightly against his chest, though not hard enough to break the hold of his arms around her. "No," she whispered. "This...this is wrong, isn't it?"

"It is," he replied. "But yet, it's right."

A heartbroken half-sigh, half-sob escaped her lips, and he stroked the back of her head, moving his fingers through her short hair. "You're not Suboshi, are you...I know you aren't, but it's still so hard, and I just couldn't stop myself...I'm sorry."

He did not want to ask the question. But he had to ask it, knew that he would hate himself for doing so, but it had to be said.

"Who is Suboshi?"

Her body went very still, and he tried not to breathe as she leaned against him, form limp and unresisting. He took her hands in his. They were very cold.

"Suboshi was....a friend." Searching his face, her eyes were uncertain, as if she was not sure the words that came from her mouth were even the truth. "He died."

A feeling of horror swept over him at her words, and he released her with a sudden flinging motion, as if even by touching her he was perpetuating the uncleanliness of what she had said. "No," he whispered hoarsely, bringing both hands to himself, wrapping them around his chest, rocking. "No. That's not true."

"Kaika-"

"He can't have died," he repeated heavily. "He can't. He can't have. He can't have died."

"Kaika."

It was her turn to wrap her arms around him, and he wanted to resist but had not the strength. He curled up in her embrace and the tears came in a flood of grief he did not know he had. He did not bother to muffle his sobs. They broke from him, loud and wracking and painful, but the door did not open and no one came into the room. There was only Yui, her voice soft in his ear.

"Shhh," she soothed. "Cry...you can cry as much as you want."

He did not remember when he stopped crying, or if he had not stopped and had fallen asleep with the tears still flowing down his face. When he awoke, it was morning, and he was in the bed which had been Yui's, but he was the only one sleeping there, he found when he rolled over a little stiffly, because he was not used to sleeping on a straw mattress that had not seen much use, and several of the straws had been poking him in the ribs as he slept.

The memory of last night was muddled and misty, but he sat with his face in his hands for several long minutes, recalling all that had happened and wondering how he would face her in the light of day, after having done what he had done.

The door opened and Yui came in.

They stared at each other and a million thoughts raced through his head, all of them discarded fragments of sentences, of greetings, and then she smiled at him.

"Good morning," she said. "I've brought you breakfast."

He accepted the tray of food with a murmured thank you, and she sat on the edge of the bed, her legs drawn up to her chest, dressed in his mother's old baggy work clothes, a fact that he found half amusing and half charming, and wished he had the guts to tell her so. But he didn't. So after a moment, he said simply said, "Thank you."

"I knew a boy much like you once," she said in return, and her voice was clear and sure, as if the memory that had been confusing last night had somehow been righted. "He'd lost someone very important to him, and I was there for him when I don't think anyone else in the world could have been. It was the only thing..." her voice faltered, and then she continued, "...the only good thing I did, I think, in a long time."

He paused in mid-bite, chopsticks lifted halfway to his mouth, feeling something like an almost-memory rising from the depths. "Keep talking," he said hesitantly. "I think I-"

She turned to look at him, her eyes bright. "Yes?"

There was a commotion outside the door. "Kaika? If you're awake, your father's got the goods ready for market!"

The moment shattered and the almost-memory dove back into the murk from which it had come. They looked at each other helplessly for a moment, and then he gave a little shake of his head, wolfed down the rest of his food, and sighed.

"I'll see you when you come home," she said.

The day at market passed without incident, and when he came home, he found Yui setting the small table for dinner. She smiled at him as he came through the door, and his mother remarked around the table that Yui had been very helpful, and she was certainly welcome to stay as long as she liked.

"Thank you very much," Yui said. "I don't have anywhere else to go at the moment, in any case."

The first week was a little awkward, for he found it difficult to adjust to the presence of a fourth body inside the house no matter how he tried to think about it. If it had been anyone but Yui, he thought, anyone but the laughing blond-haired girl who already seemed to be a part of the wood and stone-work around her, who his parents had accepted without a second thought, he would have been fine with it. Or at least that was what he kept telling himself as they ate dinner every night next to the crackling kitchen fire, and where his parents had formerly enjoyed silence at the dinner table, Yui made them smile as she talked on about what she had done that day. It wasn't that she was a huge chatterbox, because the sentences she spoke were short and succinct and quiet, but the simple sound of her voice seemed to fill even the rafter beams with sunshine.

Kaika realized one night, as he drifted off to sleep with Yui's quiet breathing from the next mattress over filling his ears, that it wasn't quite the presence of Yui that bothered him, but the way his parents acted toward her. Because they both acted as if she was the daughter they had never had, even though all of them knew that she was no such thing. And if they behaved like that with her, then what was he, Kaika, to them, but just another foundling they had picked up from the river one day and brought home with them?

The thought bothered him all through the rest of the next week, but he said nothing to either his parents or Yui. He had another one of his temper tantrums at the end of the week, stalking out of the cottage and fuming all the way to the top of the hill. Strangely, the setting sun did not calm him as he gazed off across the cliffs to the south, and he sighed and sat down.

"What am I doing here?'

"I ask myself that all the time," said Yui's voice behind him, and he was not surprised to see her drop down beside him, not surprised to know that she had followed him. This place was sacred, in his mind, but strangely, her presence did not disturb the aura that enveloped it in a wisp of cloud as the sun set.

He turned to look at her as the last rays of the sun glimmered in her eyes. "I know you," he said.

She closed her eyes, and a shiver ran through her. He hesitated a bit, and then wound one arm around her shoulders, drawing her close to him, and they sat there on the hilltop watching the moon come out.

"I don't remember," she said finally. "Not all of it, anyway. And what I do remember, you wouldn't want to hear."

Tell me anyway, he wanted to say, but knew he would regret it. "It's all right," he said out loud. "One day, you can tell me everything. I would like to know."

She nodded almost imperceptibly against his cheek. "I think I will."

They were silent for a long time again, and he stroked his fingers through her hair. "They're not my real parents," he said. "Though I'm sure you know that."

If he had not been waiting for it, he would not have noticed the way her breath caught in her throat when he said the words. "I know," she said. "It's not easy. To think of what happened, even when I am trying to think of it. But what I do remember is only bits and pieces anyway."

"It's more than I remember," he returned, and she sighed.

"I can't stay here."

The correct soothing response, he knew, would be to say that she could stay as long as she liked, or that there was no reason why she should not stay there with them, because as she had said, where else had she to go? But deep in his bones, he knew that wasn't what she meant, and that her statement had been a question to him, a challenge of sorts.

"When you leave," he said, "I'll go with you."

He spent the next week doing odd jobs around the yard and taking his father's goods to market as usual, watching Yui out of the corner of his eye in case she decided to up and leave without telling him. But she seemed her usual cheerful self around the house, and his parents seemed content enough to have them both there. The sudden rainstorm two weeks prior had upset many of the livestock, especially the chickens, whose laying cycle was just now returning to normal, and he'd been gathering the eggs the morning she came in to put something on the storehouse shelves.

As she went out the door, she said to his turned back, "Two days."

He packed that night, and after dinner, when Yui told his father and mother that she was thinking about setting out the day after next, he pushed back his chair and told them he was going with her.

He didn't know how they'd react, but he had thought maybe they would be stunned, or upset, or tearful and beg him to remain. He was surprised as his mother looked at him with an expression in her face he'd never seen before, and said, "I know."

The next day, the day before their departure, was cloudy. He spent most of the day sitting alone on his hilltop with his flute, playing the same song over and over again, not knowing why it was that one song that had any special meaning to him, but someone had liked it when he had played it before and it had become his favorite. After his lips had grown too tired to play, he lay there watching the birds wheel against the clouds, and wondered if it would rain again that night.

He started down the hill as it began to grow dark, needing to finish packing, but as he reached the bottom of the slope, he saw someone waiting for him, someone very familiar in the cloudy twilight, and he stopped in mid-step.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm offended," the familiar voice of the cloaked stranger said. "I thought we parted on good terms."

"You're not a local, and you're following me around. It's creepy. I don't like it. Stop it."

The stranger bowed her cloaked head. "You won't be seeing me again, at least for some time. I just wanted to wish you farewell before your journey in the morning."

He hissed between his teeth. "How do you know-!"

"It doesn't matter," the stranger said calmly. "The weather will be fine tomorrow."

That night, it rained.

He was not surprised to find, when he woke up the next morning, that the sun was shining brightly and that the puddles had vanished as if it had never rained in the first place. His mother made a large breakfast, and his father had put the day's wares in the cart but did not go to market, sitting silently at the table until Kaika had finished his rice and fish and Yui was stacking the dishes.

"Good luck, son," he said, and looked him in the eyes and smiled, then pushed his chair back from the table and was gone.

He made his way, a little dazed, to the bedroom to fetch his pack and his cloak and pouch of money into which he had poured the meager savings he had collected over the past few months. He had wanted to leave it for his mother, but she had shook her head, saying nonsense, it was his money and he would need it where he was going. When he finally emerged from the house, he saw them both standing there silently waiting for him, and he did not know what he would have done if his mother cried. But she didn't cry, just gave him a watery sort of smile.

"Goodbye," said Yui. "Thank you for everything."

"Goodbye," his mother responded, and her gaze swung back to him.

He dropped the heavy pack suddenly and ran into her opening arms, and she held him as he squeezed her tightly, promising that he'd be back, that he'd bring her gifts and souvenirs, and then she stopped him.

"Don't promise me anything," she said. "I just want to know that you'll be happy." Her eyes went to Yui. "That you'll both be happy."

"Mother."

"Byakko be with you both," she said, then released him, smiling warmly. "Until we meet again, my son."

They followed the main road out of the village, ignoring the children and teenagers and old men and women gawking at them and shouting inquiries. The rushing of the river left their voices behind, and they continued down the riverbed's length, not speaking, Yui following him until he stopped at a spot where a stone bridge met the muddy shore. He turned back to her, intending to say something, but when he saw her looking at him, the words he had meant to say left him, and suddenly, he laughed.

"If only I'd found this sooner," Yui said wryly.

"But then I'd never have rescued you," Kaika responded, and they shared another laugh as they crossed the bridge together, the river water foaming madly under their feet. He waited till her feet had touched solid ground, then turned an inquisitive face to hers.

"Where to?" he asked.

She hesitated a brief second, then looked up at the sun high in the sky now, making its way to the zenith point. It was not quite noon, and mountains lay to the north and the cliffs to the south. But to the east, there was forest.

His eyes met hers and as the river rushed down its channel to its destination in the south and the sea, she took a deep breath and faced to the east, just as he knew she would.

"We're going to Kutou."


	3. Part Three: Yui

Thanks to all of you who have reviewed this story so far! I've worked really hard on this and I'm glad people are enjoying it. 

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
_

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Three: Yui**

The forest was pleasant, dark and cool after half a day's walk in the sun, and they moved along in silence with only the birds chirping and leaves sighing around them. Yui's small pack was a bit rough on her shoulders, and it became increasingly heavy as they walked on. She tried to shift it around, adjusting the straps surreptitiously without Kaika noticing, but he did all the same, as she knew he would.

"I can carry that for you," he offered after the fourth or fifth time she had moved one of the straps to massage her aching shoulders. She hesitated, because it was tempting to hand off the sack of what seemed like rocks to him. But no, it wasn't right. She could carry her own pack, and he already had his own, and she could take care of herself for a change.

One thing she did remember was that she had clung too tightly to other people, and they had hurt her.

"That's all right," she replied. "It's not that heavy."

He gave her a look that was meaningful in its disbelief, but he did not pursue the subject. They passed through a small clearing and then the trees thinned and there was the sound of rushing water in the distance.

"A river?" she wondered, and Kaika quickened his pace a little. She tried to adjust his stride to match his, but his legs were longer and he moved with the grace and ease of someone who had spent his life in forests such as these.

"We'll find out," he said, then caught her eyes as she quickly looked away. "Is something wrong?"

She shook her head as they broke out of the glade of trees altogether to see a decent-sized brook bubbling in its bed ahead of them, through a mess of blue and gold and red wildflowers. She let out a delighted laugh as the weight of the pack on her shoulders seemed to lessen a bit, and ran forward. There were no heavy chains to hold her feet back this time, and the wind pulled her hair away from her face as she breathed in the heady scent of flower pollen and warm sun.

He came up beside her as she knelt beside the banks of the brook, scooping water into her mouth with greedy hands. "We've got a water skin," he offered a little awkwardly, and she simply shook her head, letting the water run from her fingers down her chin and down her neck, refreshing and alive. She thought, as she raised her gaze to look beyond the far bank of the stream, how long it had been since she had truly been alive.

"Yui?"

She glanced at him, startled, saw him carefully filling one of the waterskins he'd obviously brought in his pouch, and then offered it to her. "This might come in handy," he continued, digging through his bag for one for himself. She took it in a semi-daze, slung it around her shoulders and breathed in deeply, blew the air out through her nose.

"You seem happy," he commented. The smile that lit his hazel eyes was so warm and familiar that she caught herself smiling back almost unconsciously, caught in the moment and the eyes and face and voice of the boy that she was so sure she knew, except she did not.

The thought was a cold shiver through the warm sunlight of the day, and she looked away abruptly. "I think we should go," she said quietly, standing up and adjusting her pack so that the strap of the waterskin did not dig into her shoulder. He blinked owlishly, standing hurriedly and tying the lid around the top of the second waterskin.

"Yui, are you all right? Did I say something wrong?"

"It's fine," she told him, scanning the horizon more intently than was probably necessary, telling herself that as long as she did not look at his face she could pretend that nothing was wrong. "I'm not quite sure how to tell where we're going. We were on the sixth day of our journey when the caravan was attacked, and I had no idea when we crossed the border. Are we still in Sairou?"

She sensed his interest at her mention of the word 'caravan,' knew that she had not yet told him exactly how she had ended up in Sairou such a long way from her country, as much as she could call it that. But she did not offer any more information, and after a moment, he said, "Sairou is mostly desert and mountain, but our eastern border with Kutou turns into forest. If we're not yet in Kutou, I would say that by tomorrow, we would be."

"And when does the weather become more tolerable?"

He hesitated, and she laughed to break the awkward tension in the air. He laughed then too, a relieved sound that lifted her spirits a little, and she dared to look at him. She wasn't sure what she feared she'd see, but it was just Kaika, mussed sun-lightened hair tied at the nape of his neck and sweat trickling down his tanned face. Her memories of Suboshi, whoever he had been, were those of a fair-skinned boy standing too straight and proud, but Kaika was not like that. Kaika was comfortable like the mountains of the country he called home, constant like the sun and gentle like the wind.

It was just coincidence, she decided. Fickle memories, imposing long-gone faces onto people she had just met. "Come on," she said. "We'll swim this river."

It was refreshing to wade into the stream with their bags over their heads like pack-animals, feeling the pull of the currents, which seemed almost whimsical to her after her ordeal in Sairou. The water at the deepest point here reached barely to mid-chest, and they made the cross easily, sloshing soaked and cool and laughing to the bank, where Kaika decided that they needn't waste time drying off.

"It's warm anyway, and the sun will dry us as we walk," he said. "We can eat lunch on the way, if you like."

The mid-afternoon shadows stretched long and low before they came to the base of another forest through the rippling grass, and they agreed that it would be a good place to stop for the night. She was glad they weren't riding horses, for although horses would have carried them to this point much more quickly, horses required feeding and tethering and generally were more trouble than they were worth. She was not sure how she remembered this, but that was one memory that stood out among the others, except it had been cold, and it had been...snowing?

Kaika made a small fire as she rummaged through his pack for the pork buns he told her his mother had packed for them. He heated them over the fire and she sat on a rock, sipping her water and watching him as he poked the twigs with one long, thin stick, sending sparks flying to the sky which was beginning to grow thick with stars.

"Tell me about Kutou," he said, when he caught her watching him. "I'm sure you've got some stories. It should be more interesting than my village in Sairou, anyway, where the most exciting thing is a rainstorm every two months or so."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. What was there about Kutou that she should tell? she wondered. In her memories, as she searched for Kutou, she found a large empty blank that should have been filled with something, though she did not know what. Water, she remembered, there had been water, and fear.

"I don't remember anything about Kutou," she said at last. "I'm sorry."

He stood very still as the fire flickered over his tan features. It seemed to her for a brief moment as he turned his face away from hers in profile, that he was not a boy but a bronze statue, smooth and metallic and perfectly cast by the furnace of some god. "I didn't mean to cause you pain," he said quietly.

"It doesn't hurt to think about it," she replied. "I can tell what I do remember, but it wouldn't make too much sense, I'm afraid. My main memory has to do with a man, though I don't know how I know him. I must have been familiar with him, I think, though as a friend and not a lover. He was the one who sent me out of Kutou to Sairou." Her fists clenched at the memory and she forced herself to relax. "I don't know what I did to him, but it was enough, evidently, for him to want to get rid of me."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Kaika said. The buns were almost ready, and he poked the fire again. "He was a powerful lord, then?"

He is the emperor of Kutou now, she thought, but did not say it because even here, on the border of Sairou, she was a little afraid. "He was. He was...ambitious." She spoke slowly, picking bits and pieces from the places where they were stored, and Kaika was quiet, watching her. "He wanted to...have the country for himself, I think. I think I was just a tool to him for doing that. I think he used me, and then when he didn't need me anymore, he got rid of me."

There was a sudden clatter and she jerked her head up to see the stick fall from Kaika's hands into the fire. He stared at her through the golden flames, the shadows thick as fog around his face, but she could see that he was trembling.

"There was a man, once," he said, and she had to strain her ears to catch his words over the crackling of the fire. "He rescued...me, I think, from certain death. He saved me, but I didn't realize that I was a tool to him also. Something to be used. There were no human beings in his world, there were simply gods and slaves, and I was a slave."

She twisted her hands in her lap. "Sometimes, I wish I had died."

"Sometimes," he said, "I think I have died."

They stared at each other and she felt something, it seemed, coil around her body, around her heart, the faintest wisp of scales, like the touch of a fish, and she felt suddenly like she was burning up in fire.

"That man lied to me," she said, willing him to understand, knowing without knowing that this boy standing before had the power in his own mind to unlock the secret doors in hers. "In the end, I realized this but it was too late."

"That man claimed to serve Seiryuu, but in reality he served only himself."

"That man..." she whispered. A tremor ran through Kaika's slight frame again.

"That man's name was..." he began, and she finished the sentence for him.

"That man's name was Nakago."

They did not speak again that night. She was no longer hungry, watching him eat his share of the food in a silence that seemed a little stunned and too hushed to even be real. After he kicked out the fire, she lay down in her thin blankets and stared at the stars through the leaves of the trees, but her thoughts ran around and around in her head and it was a long time before she finally fell asleep.

The growling of her stomach woke her the next morning and she started awake, wondering where she was when she saw Kaika's blond head propped up against the bulky form of his pack, the rest of him stretched out lankily through the grass in the manner of all growing boys, and she smiled without quite knowing why. Her dinner from last night was wrapped neatly in a cloth at the edge of the dead fire. It was cold and a little hard when she bit into it, but she was hungry.

"Good morning," came the voice from behind her head, and she jumped before realizing that it was just Kaika, that he had woken up and had come up to the firepit as she had been busy eating. "I thought you might be hungry this morning so I saved your dinner."

She hesitated, and then said, "Thank you." She saw that he understood the thanks was not simply for the food, though it felt wrong to bring up the specters of last night's conversation in the cheerful light of the morning sunshine.

The forest they entered that morning was thicker than the one they had passed through before. The trees were taller here, the foliage greener, the underbrush more vibrant with life. Neither of them felt the need to speak. She stared at the back of his head as he trudged along ahead of her, thinking of what had happened last night, or perhaps had not happened, because if she thought about it too long, it seemed more like the vestiges of a dream.

They stopped briefly for lunch and then pushed on eastward. She did not know why she felt she had to hurry, nor did she know where she was hurrying to. But there was simply something inside of her that told her the faster she made this journey, the faster she could find what she was searching for, and then maybe after that she could go home.

Kaika barely said two words to her that afternoon, and when they stopped that night to make camp, he remained closed-mouth as he built up the fire. The silence was not the comfortable silence of last night, or even this morning. There was something on his mind, and though she thought she could guess what, she was not going to break his self-imposed silence and ask. She remembered Suboshi would get angry when she questioned him about something he did not want to talk about. That rule seemed to apply to Kaika as well. It fit over him like a well-worn cloak, or an old pair of shoes.

He made no move to make dinner after he had built up the fire, and finally she got tired of waiting, rose and went over to his pack, fumbling for two more of the pork buns. As she stood up to warm them over the fire, he said, "My parents found me in the river almost a year ago."

She almost dropped the food, recovered in time so that when she turned to look at him, she was calm. "I see," she said.

"They never talked about it, really, and when I woke up they just told me that I could be their son and I was welcome to stay as long as I liked. Much like what they said to you. Except about the son, I mean."

She smiled. "Go on."

"I used to have nightmares and things the first month or so I was with them, but they stopped slowly, and I don't even remember what I used to dream about. I think water, mostly, and I used to think it was because of my near drowning in the river."

She thought of her own memory of water, her fear of it still, and said nothing.

"I think they knew that eventually, I'd leave. They told me about two months after I arrived that their own son had died several years ago, and his name had been Kaika. They had been calling me Kaika since they pulled me out of the river, and Kaika I remained."

"Was it hard?" she said. "Being someone who you know you weren't?"

He looked into the fire. "At first it was. But I couldn't even remember who I used to be, and so I started doing things how I thought my parents would want them done. It was awkward, but I had nothing to go by. My own memories begin only when I woke up after they rescued me, and before that, there's nothing. But sometimes..."

She knew she was thinking of last night, when they had brought back the memory of Nakago, and then even to the days when she had first come into his life when she had called him Suboshi. To her, they were phantom memories that she did not even understand. But how hard it must be to be Kaika, she thought, and to not even have memories to go by but acting on something buried deep within.

"We've met before," she said at last, knowing how silly it was for her to even have to say that now, but it seemed to her it needed quantification. It had not been said before. "Somehow, to both of us, something happened. I don't know what. But it must have..."

"It must have been really terrible," he said slowly. Then, "I'm sorry I ignored you all day. I just needed to think. Do you realize that I never even gave my parents any warning that I was leaving? They're not really my parents, but they tried so hard. They deserved more than that."

She chewed her lip a bit, then looked down at what was left of the bun in her lap. "I think they knew," she said. "Pulling people out of a river rather speaks for itself, I think."

He laughed at that, and then stood up to put out the fire.

The fog had rolled in the next morning as they woke and set out once more, and the forest seemed muffled and silent, though she could still hear the normal whistle and click and buzz of insects through the brush. Kaika walked beside her with a hood pulled over his mess of unruly hair and looked uneasy. She tried not to let her own uneasiness show, but she did not like the fog. She much preferred the sunshine, or even the rain.

They emerged out of this forest to what would most likely have been a gorgeous landscape if they had been able to see it through the fog. As it was, the ground began to slope, and it became obvious that they were traveling into a valley and that the bits of gray and moss-green that floated above the fog were mountaintops and the tangled branches of trees. It looked to her much like one of those ancient Chinese paintings one saw in books.

She told Kaika as much, but he did not seem so much impressed as a little wary about going down into a valley in the fog. "It's all right," she said, though she wondered if she was making the right decision, if the little magnet filaments that seemed to be stuck somewhere inside her body were pointing the correct direction. "This is the right way. I know it is."

"If you say so," he muttered, his tan face looking a little waxen. She smiled a bit inside, thinking that wherever he had been from originally, a year of living in Sairou had turned him more into a creature of the deserts and arid plains than he would probably have cared to admit.

It grew dark early that day, most likely because of the fog, and when night fell, they still could barely see a thing. The fire Kaika made was small and sputtered and spat because of the moisture in the air and kindling, and they huddled close to it in their hooded cloaks, trying to soak up as much of the warmth as possible. The wind through the trees and the sound of night insects, which had been so pleasant and soothing just one night before, seemed to hold untold secrets, secrets which she did not care to investigate.

Kaika heated the last of the pork buns. She was a little sad to see them go, because that meant that there was nothing left now but the dried meat and little fruit they'd packed. If they did not happen across a village or even a farmer's hut soon, they would be needing to hunt for their meals. She wondered how good he was at hunting.

A shadow bent over her and she realized it was Kaika bending to offer her her meal, and she accepted it with a murmured thanks. He hesitated as he stood there, and then a little nervously, as if he was not sure how she would take it, he said, "It's a little cold, Yui-sama. Do you mind if I sit here?"

She stared at him and he seemed to jump back a step, and she saw the confusion in his own eyes as how the honorific suffix had been there to her name in the first place. "I don't mind," she said, trying to make her voice light. "It is cold, and the fog isn't especially pleasant."

He shuffled over and sat gingerly, his cloaked shoulder barely touching hers. They ate in silence, and she was very conscious of his warm form tantalizingly near, the movement of his mouth as he chewed, the way his hands handled the bread â₢? long, delicate fingers to which the squarely-cut fingernails seemed almost incongruous. She was still looking at his hands out of the corner of her eye when they stopped moving.

"I don't know-" he began, but she gave a sigh and leaned against him. The words he had been about to say, whatever they had been, lapsed into silence and there was a thump as his half-eaten bun fell from his hands and rolled several times before stopping before a clump of leaves. She did not know why she closed her eyes as she rested her head against his shoulder, because he was not Suboshi, and even if he had been Suboshi, she would never have done this before.

Memory, it seemed, was a powerful thing.

"Please don't," he whispered. But it was a tinny whisper, half-reluctant, so she stayed that way until at last he shifted and said the words again. "Please don't. I'm not who you think I am."

When he got to his feet a little too quickly, she remained sitting, and he said in a strangled voice, "I have to get some more wood for the fire." And fled.

She heard the crunching of his feet through the brush for a few steps, and she wanted to call out to him not to go too far, for fear he could not find his way back through the fog because the fire's light was dim, but her vocal cords seemed to have frozen. What had possessed her? she wondered angrily. She was not an impulsive girl, not like Miaka, and she had never been the type to chase after a man she could not have.

She realized she had not thought of Miaka in several days. Her heart gave a guilty lurch, and she stared into the fire as Kaika and Miaka juxtaposed themselves in front of her, two faces dissimilar but both looking at her with pleading eyes. She did not even remember where she was and why she was here, but already she had managed to hurt two more people. Was this why she had been left here alone? Was she such a hopeless case?

Footsteps neared, and she half-rose, expecting to see Kaika return with firewood in his arms, ready to apologize and to tell him she didn't know what came over her, that it wouldn't happen again. But instead of the boy coming out of the fog, the shadow was too tall, the proportions all wrong, and she shrank back.

"I saw your fire," the stranger said from under the dark cloak that obscured most of its figure, and she gasped at the voice.

"You're..."

"Mind if I warm my hands?" the woman continued, moving to come out of the shadows but not too near to the fire and to Yui. "It's cold in the forest tonight. I don't mean to intrude, of course."

"Yes, please do so," Yui managed, trying not to stare as the cloaked stranger moved into the fire's circle and stretched out her hands "Pardon me, but weren't you on the-"

"-caravan?" the woman finished, and under the stranger's hood, where her mouth was just visible, Yui saw the woman smile gently. "Yes, I was. I saw you alone and you looked cold and frightened, and I thought that I might be able to help in some small way."

"Thank you," she said gratefully. "It was very kind of you."

"Strangers in situations like that help each other. It's what we do."

They did not say anything else for several minutes, and Yui wondered if it was polite to ask the woman's name, or where she had come from, or anything about her. In the end, she decided that if the other volunteered this information, then she would listen. It seemed like prying, otherwise.

The woman's head stayed turned half to the fire, half to her, but there was nothing malicious that Yui could detect in her stance or her expression or her sense, and was it just her, or did the fog seem a little less dangerous with her there? She didn't know if it was imagination or not, but nevertheless, she found herself wishing that perhaps the stranger would stay a little longer. Kaika wouldn't mind, she thought, and it would be good to have another traveler in their party just in case.

"Would you-" she began, just as the woman said, "Isn't there?"

They both stopped, and then Yui laughed. "What were you saying?"

"Isn't there another person in your party?" the stranger said. Yui bit her lip a little bit.

"There is, but he...went off for a minute. I think I did something that he didn't like."

She felt more than saw the raised eyebrow at that statement, but the woman didn't comment on that, saying only, "It's not getting any colder or lighter as we sit here. If he doesn't come back soon it might be good for me to go look for him."

Yui thought suddenly that she heard wild music and laughter, and then there were a thousand pairs of wings fluttering around her head as everything turned pulsing blue-white-hot. The fire was melting, she thought in a daze, melting down around itself and spreading in puddles of blue smoke on the ground. Everything was blue. Her stomach hurt. No, not her stomach...it was above that, somewhere in her chest, throbbing, her heart..

. "Yui-sama," said a voice. "Yui-sama, wake up. Are you all right?"

The world jolted and fell back into place, and she opened her eyes to find concerned brown ones gazing back into hers from under a dark hood, and she gasped a bit. "What-"

"You were clutching your chest," the stranger said hesitantly. "I thought something had happened, then you...fell forward. I didn't know what to do...are you feeling all right?"

"Just a little lightheaded," Yui replied. There still seemed to be vestiges of blue around the edges of her vision, but nothing hurt now that she could feel, and she was not injured. "Thank you for-"

She stopped.

The eyes watching her under that hood were forthright, she thought, honest and sure of what she was about to say next, and they said to her, I will not lie when you ask the question.

"What did you call me just now?"

The stranger hesitated, and then pulled back the hood.

It was, Yui reflected later, very strange that she had not realized since the beginning of their conversations. Under the cloak there was pale skin and a high forehead, gray eyes and red hair, and a name flashed into her mind just as surely as if she had known it all her life.

"Soi," she said, "what are you doing here?"

The red-haired woman smiled, a strange gentleness reflected in her eyes from the flames of the fire, and then she replied, "I'm here to save you, Yui-sama."

Yui clenched her teeth at the coldness that ran through her at those words, and the cold turned into heat again as she met Soi's eyes, saw the other woman start in alarm. "I-" she began, and then her chest began to throb and she fell forward into the place where Soi was sitting, expecting her head to meet solid flesh and for Soi's outstretched hand to lock into hers.

As her head hit the ground, scattering leaves and bits of dust and dirt, as pain lanced through her temples, she saw Soi's hand pass through hers as if the other woman was no more than air. The look of grief that crossed the red-haired woman's face was almost palpable through the cold night air, and Yui wanted almost to say, no Soi, you don't have to tell me anything, because hearing it will only make it hurt all over again.

"I'm sorry, Yui-sama," Soi whispered. "I failed."


	4. Part Four: Kaika

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Four: Kaika**

He did not know where he was running when he bolted, stumbling, away from the light of the fire, only knowing that he had to get away from her- her voice, her face, the hitch in her breath as she had leaned against him as if they had been old familiar friends, or lovers. It was wrong, every sense in his body told him. It was wrong, and he could not afford to be weak.

He crashed through the brush blindly for what seemed a very long time. The bushes were thick here, and leaves and twigs tore at his hands, his face, leaving scratch marks and one tiny cut across his lips, which he knew was bleeding because he could taste it on his tongue. There was moonlight here in the forest, but it was dim through the fog, and if he had been in a calmer state of mind, he would have realized it was prudent to go back before he slipped into some hidden bog or crashed into some poisonous plant in the dark.

But he simply blundered on, his face hot and stinging from where tree branches whipped his cheeks. The feel of her skin as she buried her face in his neck was like a hot brand there, and he half-raised his hand to smear the traces of her away. He did not know why it was so wrong. It simply was wrong.

Just for a moment, the fog thinned, and the moon came out from behind the clouds, and he saw that he was surrounded by tall, dark trees, their trunks black against the silver moon, giant spears of leafy branches rising into the sky. He looked back. Of course, it was foolish. He was a long way from their camp, and he could no longer see the fire.

He stopped running.

Standing, swaying in the middle of the trees, he felt a hollow sense of despair come over him as he fell to his knees, and the faces of his mother and father flickered into his mind. He shouldn't have come, he thought. What whim had come over him that he thought he could just leave home without a word? He didn't even know...her...this girl who had appeared in his life out of nowhere and held his memories in the palm of his hand.

Crumpling to his knees in half-despair, he felt something tumble out of his belt and roll down one knee to land in a pile of dead leaves. He reached down one hand to touch it.

It was his flute.

He knelt there, fingering the instrument absently, taking deep, gulping breaths of cool forest air. He was not afraid of the dark, nor the trees nor the fog, because something told him that he had grown up in places such as this and he had the power somewhere within him to quell any fears that he might have. He did not know why - he'd woken up in his bed in Sairou that day knowing it, just as he had known that there was something about the flute that was powerful to him, so powerful that he had begged his parents day and night to tell him where they were hiding it until they finally told him that he had been devoid of any possessions when they found him, save the clothes on his back.

He'd asked every passing peddler and merchant, but none of them carried flutes. So he had finally made one himself. It was a little crude and the finger-holes were not even, but it was enough. That knowledge was a part of him, too, but it was comforting somehow to know that whatever he had been in his past life, it could not have been so bad if he had been a flute-maker.

_Suboshi was...a friend. He died._

No, he shook his head soundlessly. Suboshi couldn't have died. He would have felt it, he knew, if Suboshi had died, though there was something nagging at the back of his mind about that too. There were days when he woke up and saw the blue sky through his window and felt strange, like he should have been dead.

Finding his way back to Yui and the fire was most likely a lost cause. He wondered if she would come to look for him, then decided that if she were to do so, she would wait till morning. Leaving the fire would mean that they would both be lost, wandering around the great forest like two blind humans in the dark, and she was not stupid.

He grasped the flute firmly in his hand, intending to bring it back to its resting spot in his belt. It seemed almost of its own accord that his hand kept rising past his waist, bringing the instrument to his mouth, and he began to play. There was no conscious thought that kept the melody moving, nothing but his mouth and fingers on the hollow reed and the air swelling in currents of sound around him. He could almost see the notes, he thought, see them as they coursed on the wind around the trunks of the trees and each bush and flower, lighting them like sun's rays.

_You can...forget..._

The music soared over him and he felt it soak into his bones and his blood like a seeking living thing, familiar and warm, a small child's hand reaching up to grasp his own. A little boy looking up at him, large eyes and sweet smile, the brightest laugh he had ever heard, and he leaned down to pick the child up and wrap his arms around him. I love him, he thought. I love him more than anything or anyone in this world, and there is nothing I would not do for him.

The stars reached down to cradle them in a warm bower of light. The child moved in his arms, breath sweet against his cheek. From somewhere there was music reaching their ears with a distant glow like sparking fireworks and it was just the two of them alone in the universe, their light against the dark, and he hugged the child to his chest and cried as they fell together.

The rough jolt he felt were leaves beneath his hands, the sudden jarring was his flute falling from his fingers, and the almost inaudible ticking was the sound of his tears rolling down his cheeks and dripping one by one from his chin to puddle on the forest dirt below.

Suddenly, he realized he was not alone.

He started to move, to turn around, but the presence at his back did not feel threatening and so he remained where he was in a crouch over the forest floor, hunched over like his very life blood was draining from him. It hurt to breathe. He saw his flute as a slim sliver of moonlight through the leaves, and then the stranger spoke.

"When you didn't come back, Yui-sama was worried."

At the familiar voice, he stiffened. Questions flashed through his mind, accusations and half-truths, and finally he settled on the one that felt the most sensible to ask.

"How did you find me?"

The woman laughed, low and huskily. "Easy," she said. "I heard your flute."

He drew a deep breath and blew it out in frustration, standing on unsteady legs and jabbing his flute back into his belt at last. It seemed to protest at its forced treatment, and he tied the cloth firmly around it so it could not fall out again. He was forever having bad luck with that, it seemed. "I can't go back there," he said. "You don't understand."

A slight chuckle from behind him. "On the contrary. I understand very well. And if you're afraid that she's upset...she sent me out here to find you."

"I don't care about that," he grumbled, a little peeved at how the other seemed to be having fun at his expense. "I've got better things to do with my time than argue with you, too."

"You do? Out here in the middle of the forest in the fog in the middle of the night? I have yet to believe that."

"Shut up."

The stranger seemed to realize she had gone too far, for she didn't answer, waited for him to swallow once, twice, square his shoulders, breathe out another long sigh. Then she said, "I'm sorry."

"Forget it," he said roughly. "I don't even know you. I don't know why I'm arguing with a stranger." He turned so that she couldn't see his face, but for some reason he'd gotten turned around, and when he looked up, she was standing in front of him, as the fog chose for that moment to lift and the moonlight shone bright down through the trees onto her face.

He froze.

She reached out one hand to him slowly, and without quite knowing how or why, he lifted his ever so slightly, gazing into those gray eyes in a daze. The ghostly music that had been so clear earlier rang in his ears. There was the laughter of a small child, and he shivered, took one step towards her, then another, and then raised his palm to meet hers-

"Don't," she said clearly, and dropped her hand.

He stared at her as she moved back a pace, tilting her head and regarding him with a look on her face that did not quite match any expression he'd seen before. He must look very odd, he realized, with one hand raised up in the air to touch someone who was not there, but his arm wouldn't move, and he stood there for several seconds until she said, "We should be going."

The spell broke, and his arm dropped back down to his side as he sagged to the ground. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face and he felt hot and cold, head throbbing, and his stomach heaved like he was going to be sick. There was medicine in the pack, but he had left that with Yui.

"Get away from me," he rasped. "Stop saving me. You're always saving me. For once, I just want to save myself."

Thankfully, the woman drew no nearer and he breathed in and out several times deeply, raising a hand to his face and feeling the rough reality of the dirt that stuck to his palm. The tiny stones pressed deep into his skin and he relished the feel of the discomfort that bordered on pain. This was real. Amid the memories that he did not even know if they were reality or illusion, the forest around him, the branches swaying in the wind and the moonlight on the dead leaves was solid and comforting.

"Amiboshi," the woman said, "we must go."

He got to his feet and checked to make sure his flute was still in his belt, and then stopped.

"My name is Kaika," he said.

She opened her mouth, and he stopped her with swift, cutting motion of the hand as if his fingers were the cold blades of knives. A cloud of darkness passed before his eyes, and when he could see again, she'd moved closer to him with her eyes on a point somewhere beyond him, as if she were looking far away at a distant land he'd never seen.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "Kaika. I'll show you the way back to camp."

He didn't know how she knew the path so clearly. Maybe she had extraordinary night vision and could make out every branch he had broken and every bush he'd crashed into on the way to his final destination there in the middle of the forest. Or perhaps she was just a great forestwoman. There were people like that, he knew, who made it their livelihood to track living things out in the wilds, who could move through the trees without a sound and without leaving any disturbance in their wake. He had been one of those, once. A year of living in Sairou had made him soft.

"Are you from Kutou?" he asked her finally.

There was a moment of hesitation before she answered. "Yes," she said. "Though I have been abroad as of late. I hadn't thought of returning to Kutou until I met you."

He thought of her sitting at the well, waiting for him, then their encounter at the bottom of his hill. "Why?" he asked.

Another hesitation. "You could say I had something I was supposed to do, and I failed to complete it. I'm...here to make sure that I don't leave anything undone." A dry chuckle. "You could say that I'm paying my penance."

He frowned. "Penance for what?'

"For my sins," she returned, and then he saw ahead of them the warm glow of a fire, and the silhouette of someone jumping to her feet as they emerged into the flickering light, and Yui was there, watching him with worried eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said awkwardly. "I shouldn't have run off."

He could tell she wanted to touch him but was afraid to, and he felt very ashamed of himself for his reaction earlier, so he walked toward her and stopped, quite close. "It's all right," he told her softly. "Please don't think I'm angry at you."

She stared at him, and when she didn't move, he picked up her right hand and placed it gently on his shoulder.

A moment passed, and then she smiled. "I saved your food," she said. "Though it's rather cold now. I was going to make you another one, and then I remembered we'd eaten all of them. There's some dried beef, I think, if you want it."

"Thanks," he said, "but I'm not really that hungry. I'll just finish my bread."

He moved to the fire and bent to sit down, before he remembered and stood back up quickly. Looking back to where the circle of light met the trees, he expected to see the stranger standing there watching them, waiting for an invitation, but there was no one there. "Yui?" he said, and he knew his voice sounded strange, like it was thick with tears, though he did not feel like crying. "That woman just now. She's gone."

Yui smiled sadly and he sensed that something was amiss. But she did not volunteer information, only said, "She'll come back when the time is right. Don't worry, Kaika."

He clenched his fists over the cold food in his hands, squeezed his eyes shut and thought of the wild flute music, the cry of the child in his arms. It was no use, he finally thought, and opened his eyes. For some reason, everything was blurry and he could not quite breathe.

"I-"

"Kaika?" Yui's worried voice came through the fog that surrounded his senses, and he shook his head.

"My name is..."

She had been reaching a hand toward him, but at his words, she stopped.

"My name..."

"I know you're not Suboshi," Yui whispered. "Don't trouble yourself over it. I'll try to-"

"No," he said. "That's not it. There is something...something that I..." Like a part of me that was lost has come back to me, he thought, and it was on the tip of his tongue before he stopped himself from saying it. Did that even make sense? He didn't think so. He sat furiously and bit into the bun so hard that he bit his tongue, and yelped.

Yui laughed.

He smiled at the sound of that and finished the bread quickly, staring into the flames of the fire as it began to die. The night was waxing, and soon it would be time to sleep, but he was not tired.

"Do you remember Soi?" Yui asked suddenly.

The name struck a chord within him and he had the memory of a woman's hand, a soft voice. She had been kind, he remembered. Very kind, yet very fierce and very sad.

"Yes," he said. "I do."

"She was with me on the...journey. To Sairou, I mean. She sat in my caravan wagon and one night when it was cold, she gave me a blanket. I never saw her face and never knew who she was until tonight, but I thought her voice was familiar."

He was silent, trying to place the red-haired woman in his memory. It had a place, he knew, somewhere. He could grasp the shape of her memory puzzle piece in his hand, knew the corners and dents and ridges of its edges, but could not make it fit. There was no room for her in the framework of what he remembered, and it frustrated him. "I saw her twice," he said. "Once by the village well, that day I brought you home, and the second time the night before we left. She told me your name was Yui."

Yui smiled. "Did she? That was nice of her."

There was a wistful tone in her voice that intrigued him. "Were you friends?" he wondered, hoping that something she'd say would jog something loose. But she shook her head slowly.

"I...no, we weren't friends. She didn't like me then, and I didn't like her. I don't know why, but it's what I remember."

"That's too bad," he said. "Perhaps it will be different this time around. She told me she was from Kutou. I wonder if she lives near here?"

"She-" began Yui, then stopped. A flash of pain passed over her face, and he tensed, about to spring up if anything happened, but she simply sat back and sighed. "No, she doesn't. Not anymore. She hasn't...been to Kutou in a long time."

She said she came back to pay penance for her sins, he almost said, then decided against it. Instead, he said, "It's getting late. We should go to bed."

He wondered if Soi would show up the next morning, appear just like she did last night by the ashes of the fire in the sunlight that burned the fog away, and when he opened his eyes he sat up looking for her. The trees stretched clear through the sunshine and to his right he saw Yui still asleep, curled up in her blanket. But Soi was not there.

Shaking his head, he rummaged through the pack for his waterskin. The cool water was refreshing to his parched throat, and he was still drinking when he felt someone come through the bushes behind him. He glanced at Yui, still asleep, and then finished drinking, replaced the cover on the waterskin, placed it back in his pack, and then said, "Hello, Soi."

"Good morning," she responded. "I like talking to people better when I can see their faces."

He squared his shoulders and turned around reluctantly. She was standing there under the trees with her arms crossed over her chest, still wearing the dark cloak but with the hood thrown back so that the sun sparkled on her red hair and he could see her face clearly. He wasn't sure what he had expected to happen - a lightning strike of memory from heaven, perhaps. But whatever it was, it didn't happen. She simply stood there regarding him with a touch of annoyance as the birds sang their morning songs in the foliage above their heads.

"Thank you for showing me back," he said finally.

"I regret I can't accompany you on your journey today," she said, "but I have some things for you, if you'd like."

That piqued his curiosity. "What things?"

"Everyday things that you seem to have forgotten, or left behind," she said, a touch of laughter on her lips. When he didn't move, she said impatiently, "Hold out your hand."

He stretched out his right hand, and from somewhere she produced a small sack, which she dropped lightly into his raised palm. He immediately grunted and almost dropped it.

"What is this?"

"Open it and find out after I'm gone," she said, and then her tone softened. "I'll see you in a few days. I have some errands to run first. There's a village about two hours from here where you can get a bite to eat and maybe sleep in a warm bed if you'd like. Don't lose the things I gave you."

He'd been examining the pouch in his hand, had put a hand to the drawstring when she stopped talking, and when he looked up she was gone. "Soi?" he said, then louder: "Soi!"

Yui grumbled and rolled over.

He hurriedly crouched by his pack, putting the small sack out of sight, and then set about kicking the ashes to make sure they were dead, then to erase the traces of their fire so they would not be tracked. He didn't know who would be tracking them except for Soi, perhaps, but it never hurt to make sure. At the very least, it would stop wild animals from questioning.

"Suboshi?" said Yui from behind him sleepily, and when he turned sharply, she'd clapped both hands over her mouth. "Sorry," she said from behind her fingers. "Sorry. Gods, sorry..."

There was no point in getting angry about it, so he simply forced a smile and blinked back the tears. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I regret to say there's not much breakfast food today. All we have is some dried meat, I think. I wish we could have brought some rice."

She rubbed her eyes, still not quite looking at him. "That's fine." Rummaging through her pack, she produced one of the cloth-wrapped strips, and they chewed the tough meat in silence, before she said, "Kaika, I-"

He held up one hand. "If we're going to be traveling together, it's something we're both going to have to get used to. It's not like either of us can help it, and apologizing gets old after a while. Don't you think so?"

"I don't want to make you hurt any more than you already are," she said in a low voice.

Getting to his feet, he stretched and then hoisted his pack onto his back. "I told you already, don't worry about it. Every time you hurt me is maybe one step closer that I get to remembering who I am and what I'm doing here."

He could see her digesting his words slowly as she chewed the last of the meat, and then she looked up at him. "I suppose," she said at last. "If you put it that way, I can see what you mean."

"Well then, it's all right." He offered her his hand to pull her up and she took it with a small grin. "Soi said there's a village somewhere near here. We might start by trying to find it."

The forest thinned almost immediately as they continued following the mountain downhill. It was a pleasant walk, made easier by the fact that the slope followed a gentle decline and most of the brush underneath was made up of dead leaves and twigs, like a soft carpet. They had walked perhaps the better part of the hour when Yui held up one hand and looked back at him.

"Do you hear that?"

The sound of water was plain to his ears, but even louder than that was the sound of children's laughter and the grunting of what sounded like pigs. "People!" he said, and scrambled the rest of the way down.

The trees opened up into a magnificent valley dotted with splendid-looking groves of trees on both sides of a shallow rushing river. Several modest bamboo huts stood on the near side of the bank, and at the entrance to one of them, two children were playing in the mud. Behind the house, in a crude wooden enclosure, were the pigs.

"Hello?" Yui called. "Hello there!"

The children stilled for a moment, wide-eyed, hands and faces covered in mud, and he couldn't help but laugh as one of them vanished inside the house and came back a moment later with a large, broad-faced woman in tow. She looked surprised to see them, but she smiled cordially enough, and Yui smiled back. He trailed behind her, not sure what to say. If Yui was going to take the lead, he thought, he'd let her.

"We're travelers from Sairou," Yui began when they came closer, "and I was wondering if you knew of a village or town around here? We heard there was one about an hour's distance, but we don't know what direction."

"Oh sure," the woman said, her rurally accented dialect strange to his ears, and he had to strain to catch what she was saying. Yui didn't seem to have any trouble following along. "Due east, if you follow the river. Can't miss it. Water flows directly through the center of town." She narrowed her eyes critically at them, obviously wondering what two young people were doing hiking through the mountains. He didn't know what they'd say if she asked, but she didn't ask.

Yui bowed politely. "Thank you very much."

"Don't mention it," the woman said, then raised a broad hand suddenly. "Safe journey!"

He moved up beside her as they made their way down past the cottages to the river. It was much wider than it had looked from far up the hill, though it seemed to be just as shallow, gurgling in its huge basin as it spilled over a rocky bed and disappeared behind the curve of the looming hills in the distance. On a whim, he stopped, bent over and slipped off his shoes, and then splashed into the water. It foamed around his ankles and he reveled in the feel of sand between his toes as Yui watched him with amusement.

"Come on in," he said. "There's no use wasting a good river."

She laughed and took off her shoes too, wading in as he moved aside to make room for her. The water rose almost to mid-calf where he stood, and suddenly on a whim he held out his hand to her. "Shall we go?" he said.

She looked at his hand and then back at his face. He tried to keep the smile there, but he could not, feeling the strain on the corners of his mouth. Drops of river water splashed up to the bare skin of his outstretched arm and he wondered what he would do if she rejected him after all. No more apologies, he'd said earlier this morning, but this situation was not like the rest.

"I don't-" he began, and she reached out a little unsteadily and placed her hand in his. Her palm was slightly sweaty, and smaller than he had expected. They stood there together for a moment in the roar of the river, and then he squeezed her hand and began to walk.

The river wound behind the hills they had seen earlier from the woman's hut, cutting a deep chasm through steep valleys that somehow felt to him more familiar than the red cliffs of Sairou ever had. Yui's hand wrapped around his loosely, and he almost felt as if he should not look down at her face at all, as if the pressure of his hand on hers was a sacred daydream, something that would disappear if he dared to test the reality of it. There were words he must say, he felt. Words that she should hear before they reached whatever destination they were heading towards, words that might have no bearing on anything but the state of his heart, if she was willing to listen. But there was something about the warmth of her hand and the cool water of the river and the bright sun beating down on the both of them that said to him, not yet.

"I was thinking we could stay the night in the village," Yui said, and he caught in her voice the wistfulness of someone who was used to the comfort of a solid mattress and a hot meal. How hard was it for her to have to endure all those nights with him in the forest? he wondered, and suddenly felt a bit guilty.

"We can do that," he said. "How much money do we have?"

Her hand tensed in his. "I don't know. I didn't pack any."

"I have a little," he began, and then the thought of Soi's mysterious bag hit him, and he stopped walking, trying to fumble open his pack with one hand while still holding onto hers with the other.

Yui watched him curiously. "What are you doing?"

"It might be money," he said, and she evidently had realized what he was up to, because she let go of his hand and moved around behind him to open his pack for him. He rubbed the suddenly free hand against the side of his shirt. The wind against his damp palm was dry and cool.

The pouch Yui placed in his hand was as heavy as he remembered it, and he fumbled the drawstring open as she looked over his shoulder, reaching one hand inside the pouch and feeling the hard, flat, cold surfaces of metal there.

"It's money," he said in amazement, tipping the bag into her cupped hands. "Look, Yui." He'd never seen this much money in his entire life, he thought, recalling the simple lives his parents led, remembering the early mornings and the late evenings at market. "We've got enough to stay in the village forever, if you'd like."

Yui laughed softly and fingered the coins in her palm. The bag seemed still just as heavy as it had been before he had given her the coins. "One night's enough."

"Two nights," he said, and he looked up from the bag into her face, into her eyes. He caught the trace of a worried expression before her facial muscles relaxed and she smiled at him, as if she had been waiting for him to look at her for a very long time. He noticed, as if for the first time, how long her eyelashes were. "Until we figure out where we're going. Because unless I'm mistaken, you have no clue."

She opened her mouth as if to protest, then shut it. "No," she said. "You're right. I don't know. I've been...walking, hoping I'd remember something, maybe. Or that something would happen, maybe..." A sigh. "I'm sorry. It's not fair to you, Kaika."

"I trust you," he said simply.

A moment's hesitation, and then Yui said, without meeting his eyes, "Thank you. That means a lot."

There was an awkward silence, and then she made a sound in the back of her throat that was almost a laugh, but not quite. "Well, Soi trusts us, anyway," she continued, as if the moment had not happened. "Though I wonder if that's wise."

"She said the bag was full of everyday things we'd forgotten." He dug another fist into the bag, wondering if it had a bottom, or if it was one of those magic bags that he'd heard about in legends, the ones given by the gods that could be poured and poured and never went empty. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to be one of them, because the bag had a bottom and he could feel its rough cloth surface quite tangibly. "I suppose you could-"

"Kaika?" Yui said curiously as he broke off the sentence abruptly, fishing around in the bottom of the bag for that odd shape he had felt, the shape amid the flat discs of metal that was smaller, spherical and ridged, and not money, but it seemed to have disappeared amid the rest of the coins. Impossible, he thought, and kept digging, fingers scrabbling till they felt quite numb.

And then he found it.

He grabbed ahold of it, not caring that he snagged a few coins in his grip as well, bringing his closed fist out of the sea of coins out into the open air, and Yui stared at it, then at him.

"What are you doing?"

"I found something," he said, not bothering to elaborate as he opened his fist and picked the coins off the object that lay there, throwing them back into the bag and shifting it into the crook of his free arm as he examined the thing that was left there.

"What is that?" she wondered, moving closer.

That was a good question, was his first thought as he gazed down at it. Surely it had to be a mistake, because why would Soi place something such as this in a bag full of money? It felt light in his hand, surface deeply pitted with what looked like scores formed by eons of erosion, but which could not be because he realized in the next instant that what he held was not a rock, nor was it any sort of mystical object that should puzzle the human mind.

The object shining dully in the palm of his hand was a small, white clam shell.


	5. Part Five: Yui

Sorry it took so long for the next chapter! I was out of town and just got back a few days ago.Pleaseenjoy. 

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

_  
_**Sonzai (Existence)  
Five: Yui**

The village was so good-sized that it boasted three inns, two of decent caliber and one that claimed it was of exceptional quality and charged double the price of the other two. Kaika had protested, but Yui wasn't having it. "We've got the money," she told him firmly, "and we deserve it. Just one night."

In the end, Kaika had put down the money for two nights, and Yui had collapsed onto the bed in their second-floor room as her tired muscles screamed with joy, and vowed never to move again. Kaika watched her out of the corner of his eye with a concerned expression when he thought she wasn't looking, and she answered his questions in a soothing tone and assured him that yes, she was indeed all right. When he left half an hour later to forage for food in the nearby marketplace, he was still not looking reassured.

He worried about her, she knew. It felt almost wrong of him to do so, because he had known her barely three weeks, and already he was treating her like a trusted friend, a family member. She didn't know if she liked that or not. One part of her screamed that she could take care of herself, and the other part screamed that she did not deserve him. That she was a liar, a thief, someone too guilty for the affections of a boy like him.

It didn't matter that she did not remember what she had done that was so terrible. Kaika could not know - could never know - that her penance had only just begun. Soi had said that about herself as they sat around the fire that night waiting for Kaika to return, but Yui knew it was true of both of them. She was certain that Soi remembered everything, but yet it seemed almost like a lie, like selling one's soul for something cheap and broken in return, for her to ask Soi about the past.

Besides, Soi had died.

She did not quite remember Soi's death, but when the ghostly hand had passed through hers, she had felt a sense of certainty, as if all along she should have known and it had been her own fault for having forgotten. Soi had not died for Yui, but she had died for someone who had been close to Yui. Someone who was...

The memory did not come, and Yui got up from the bed, wincing as her sore feet met wooden floor. Kaika had left the window open with a single candle burning on the low desk next to it, and the streets below were lively with the onset of evening, crowds passing back and forth through the crossroads beside which the inn was built, lanterns being lit one by one until the people swam through the streets as if in a sea of fire. She leaned against the windowsill and watched them, feeling a twinge of sadness as she thought of the lights of Tokyo, of the trains passing in and out of the stations, of her mother and father sitting down to dinner without her, of Miaka. Did they miss her? she wondered. Were they searching for her still, or had they moved on with their lives already?

How much did she, Hongou Yui, one lone girl in the ocean that was Tokyo, that was Japan and the world, really matter to anyone in the end?

The thought depressed her and she stuck her hands into her pockets, blowing out a deep sigh, and her left hand brushed the object that she'd dropped into her pocket earlier and had forgotten about. She blinked, drawing it out, and examined it in the dim light.

The clam shell was tightly shut, and no amount of prodding with her fingertips could pry it open, so she turned it over in her palm and traced its hard ridges absently. It felt old, she realized. That was the only word that could describe it - not a material sort of old, nor the oldness that came with age, like of the elderly or one's grandparents. It was a different kind of old, maybe the feeling one would get when picking up a fossil or a prehistoric bone, and with that came the sense of...being watched.

Her skin prickled and she froze, spinning around to the door, thinking that there was someone who had come into the room silently without her hearing. But the door was closed and locked, just as Kaika had left it, and the room was empty. She swallowed and stared outside again but the feeling did not go away, and though the sound of laughter and music came through the open window she suddenly felt very alone.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

There was no answer. A sudden breeze whipped through the window and the candle on the desk went out.

A shiver of fear rippled through her as her legs trembled and then collapsed beneath her and she tumbled forward to the cold, wooden floor, a cry of pain escaping from her lips as she banged her elbow on the leg of the desk. The clam shell left her hands as she did so, skittering across a few floor boards before coming to rest with a curious twirling motion next to her knapsack beside the bed.

She heard, inside her head, the sound of someone laughing.

"Who's there?" she said again, and then everything began to glow.

It began with the shell itself, and at first she thought it was just the vestige of lantern light and moonlight coming through the window. But no, as she watched, the blue tinge that surrounded it was strengthening, wavering and lengthening until the entire clam was engulfed in blue, like cold fire. It was not just the clam, she noticed then. Her vision seemed to be blurring at the edges, but she could see the same blue halo around her, her arms and legs and the edges of her cloak. In a daze, she raised one hand in front of her face, where the blue glow was so intense that she had to look away. The world was shrinking.

Her arms were heavy now and she could not hold herself up. It was very hot. The floor was cool to the touch, and she laid her cheek on it as the throbbing began again in her stomach, working her way up to her chest, where it pulsed and gnawed at her and as a whimper escaped her, she felt the presence there, stronger than before, a darkness through the blue light where there had not been before.

_Seiryuu no Miko._

"Who are you?" she breathed, reaching out one hand, clawing it toward the clam shell as if by removing it from her line of sight she could somehow save herself, save...but the voice simply laughed, and her fingers twitched, refused to obey the commands of her brain. She whimpered again. The presence loomed in her narrowing field of vision and she tried to inch back, knowing that she could not let it touch her. Darkness and blue light swayed until she could not even tell which was which, and she thought she heard someone calling her name, but that could not be real, either, as the presence was shifting now, turning, withdrawing-?

"Yui!"

There was another voice calling her name, someone tangible, someone hovering at her shoulder, and then she realized there was no blue light, no darkness, just shadows cast by the moonlight and the person at her side was Soi.

"Yui-sama, are you hurt?"

She tried to move her mouth to say that no, she was not hurt, just a little stunned and surprised and what on earth was that thing that had tried to attack her. But nothing came. Soi's eyes were worried and frustrated at the same time as Yui finally managed to move one hand and then the other, dragging herself backward to the bed and leaning against it. She did not have the energy to get up.

"What happened in here?" Soi asked tersely.

Yui shook her head. "I...don't know. I wish I could tell you. I..."

As she trailed off, Soi hissed softly and Yui followed her narrowed gaze in puzzlement before realizing that she had knocked the clam shell a few paces to her left in her efforts to sit up. In the dimness, it shone a pale white, like moonstone.

Soi said quietly, "Where did you get that?"

"We found it," Yui said. "In the pouch of money you gave us. It was at the bottom, and Kaika assumed that you'd put it in there, though we couldn't figure out for what. It was an odd sort of thing to put in a money pouch, I thought, but-"

"But nothing," Soi cut off harshly, and Yui focused on her face with effort and realized that Soi looked truly angry. "You could have been killed. That thing isn't a toy."

She felt herself grow defensive, and heard the sting in her own voice as she snapped back, "and how was I to know?"

"Give it to me," Soi said flatly.

Yui reached out a hand to it, and then stopped. Watching the other woman. "Why?" she said.

She saw Soi struggle for a moment, as if unsure how to put thoughts into words, and then she said, "Because I don't want you to be hurt again."

The tears welled up almost involuntarily, and Yui squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the wetness cling to her lashes. "It's another link, isn't it? To the past, to you and Kaika and all these people who I've forgotten. If it is, if it's that important, then I want to keep it. I need to keep it."

"For another repeat of tonight?"

"If that's what it takes," Yui said quietly, "then yes."

Soi closed her eyes briefly, and Yui realized she could see for the first time, ever so faintly, a thin halo of light around the other woman's form, as if her edges had been smudged, erased and blurred so that they were no longer solid. "I do believe," Soi said at last, "Nakago might have underestimated you."

She seized that name, hung onto it like a lifeline. Her worst enemy become her means of salvation, she thought in passing, but the thought did not faze her. "Tell me about Nakago," she said. "I want to know." And as Soi stared at her, her face almost stricken, she went on in a gentler voice, "That's why you came back, isn't it?"

For a long, frozen minute she wondered if she had said the right thing, and then Soi abruptly folder her legs under her and sat, almost smiling. "Your question is too hard for me to slither out of, so I might as well tell you what I can." A pause. "I am not telling you this to jog your memory, or to try and help you remember what you've forgotten. Only you can do that."

"I understand," Yui said. "I'm not asking you to." She noticed how the light caught Soi's red hair and held it, not as it would normal human hair but as if it were light trapped through folds of gossamer. "But I think you know that all this has to do with Nakago, and if I'm going to be seeing him again, I would rather go armed."

"Seeing Nakago again," Soi murmured. "No way around that, is there? And I wonder just how much good that will do in the end. Nakago now is not the man I used to know."

"I feel the same way." She saw Soi frown at her and she shook her head. "I don't remember much. But from what I can remember, when I woke up, and Nakago was there talking to me, threatening me...something felt wrong. It wasn't as much of what he did or said as how he felt. He - felt different, somehow." She waited for Soi to say something, and when the other woman did not, Yui said, "Did you know he no longer wears his earring?"

Soi finally whispered something, but it was so soft that Yui could not hear it, and when she leaned forward to say, pardon me, Soi looked at her and said, "There was a war."

Yui blinked.

"There was a war," Soi said again. "I helped start that war, and I don't blame anyone but myself for letting it happen. There were many people who I killed who did not deserve to be killed. There were a great many things that I did that I am not proud of, and that I wished I hadn't done. I told myself that it would all even out in the end and that things would turn out all right, but I knew even then that I was only cheating myself."

Yui whispered, "Then why did you do it?"

But she already knew the answer before Soi said, "I did it for Nakago."

"Nakago lied," Yui said. "I know that much. He lied to me, he lied to you, and I know he lied to Kaika, though I don't know how. He lied to all of us. It's funny, isn't it? I think I knew back then too, somehow, but I didn't want to believe myself."

Soi smiled bitterly. "You were one of the people who I hated most of all. There were times I would walk past your room at night and think that only if you were dead, half of my problems would just melt away. I thought about killing you almost constantly in those first few months you came into my life."

"But you didn't," Yui said. "Because of Nakago?"

"Nakago needed you. You were part of his plan. The last part of his plan, and with you all the stakes were in place and everything was set. I couldn't bear to wreck that, much as I am ashamed to admit it, because that was what he'd worked his whole life toward. Even I was part of it, a tool, something for him to use."

There were no words, she thought, to respond to a confession like that, so Yui said nothing. Soi went on after a moment, "I don't think I would ever have realized what a shell of a woman I'd become if it wasn't for your friend."

"My friend?" Yui stared at her. "What friend?"

Even in the dimness of the room she could see the pain on Soi's face, a pain that haunted her still after death, as she said, "Your friend Miaka. The Suzaku no Miko."

"Suzaku...no Miko?"

"You don't even remember her?" Soi mused, leaning forward, her eyes searching Yui's face. Yui held her breath, for what she did not know, but she waited as Soi's eyes moved slowly across her features, as if looking for something she could not see, perhaps something deep within her that the living could not touch. When Soi raised one hand and raised it to her cheek, she felt not the touch of human skin to skin, but only a slight chill, as if from a tendril of cool wind.

"I remember her," Yui said, "but only like the memory of a shadow, and even that is fading."

"I don't mean to hurt you," Soi said. "Please trust me."

"What are you-" Yui began, but even as she said the words, they died unspoken in her throat as Soi leaned forward and kissed her.

Her lips were hard, almost bruising, and the jolt of fear that ran through her at the force of Soi's lips on her hers was an almost tangible physical reaction. Her first instinct was to scream, and her second was to run, to run from the suddenly powerful and menacing figure holding her down, from the nameless panic rising like water bubbles in the back of her mind, screaming at her that it was happening again, and this time she could not escape.

It was useless to struggle, because how could one struggle against a ghost? She squeezed her eyes closed, heard Nakago's voice in her head, laughing, and then she heard him say, do you really think that girl came back for your sake?

But no, that was a memory.

She jerked suddenly against Soi's mouth as the remembrance hit her with full force, but the other woman's lips remained firmly pressed against hers, that almost-touch reaching up again to stroke her forehead, and she felt pleasantly warm, as if by a suddenly kindled fire. Someone was speaking into her mind.

_Yui-sama, please look at me._

Her eyes snapped open and she saw that Soi and the room and everything around her was gone as she spun slowly earthwards in a pool of blue light, and then the images flashed by her, faster and faster until she was swimming in a whirlpool of them, and out of them, Nakago spoke again.

"There is only one person who can give me what I want," he said, "and you are not her."

A sense of overpowering grief and despair washed over her and she clutched her head and tried to scream, but no sound came. Instead, she saw Nakago standing over a dead wolf with a beautiful jeweled necklace clutched in his hands, felt her own horror at what he had just done but unable to give it words. A man with long, long black hair done up in elaborate headdress, lashing out with strokes of darkness, but she could not see his face, though she felt the hatred rolling off him as if in black waves of water. The sound of a flute, she thought, and the crackling of fire. Kaika's face, but the anger in the eyes was all wrong, and then the girl behind him whose face was so set with grim certainty it hurt her heart to see it, a girl who the boy was running towards with desperation, as if he were trying to save her.

And then she saw that the boy there was not Kaika, and the girl standing behind him...was her.

"Soi," she tried to say, but she found she could not speak, could not even breathe. Nakago was striding toward her now, and she saw herself moving toward him willingly, lifting her lips to his in a long, cold kiss, feeling his hands stroke her hair and move down to her shoulders, undoing the robe that hung there, and then she realized that these memories were not her own. They were Soi's memories, she saw in a moment of clarity, all of them no matter how painful, of Soi's life and her past but most of all, of Nakago, because Yui had wanted to know.

Nakago's skin was warm on hers and she almost cried at the gentle touch of his lips on her neck, at the feel of his skin under her own hands, as she opened her eyes and saw the blue symbol glowing on his forehead.

_Heart._

The sound of battle rose around her and then all she could see were Nakago's eyes gazing down in shock at hers, her hand stroking his cheek as she fell backwards and the world went dim around the edges, and she heard herself say, my last gift to you.

And then everything ended.

She was crying, she realized, the tears coming and she could not stop them as she sagged against the bedframe, her limbs lax and feeling like putty. The wooden floor was cold and solid beneath her hands and the mattress of the bed soft behind her head, and she raised her fingers to her lips because the touch of air on them felt almost like a cruel joke.

"Soi," she said, and opened her eyes.

The other woman was standing at the window. Yui could see only her cloaked back, felt the breeze from the window on her face that did not so much as rustle a strand of the waterfall of hair around Soi's shoulders. "Soi," she said again, knowing that what she was about to say would perhaps be another wound after what Soi had shown her, but she had to say it. "Take off your cloak."

The air shivered in the wake of her words and she saw Soi stiffen, but she simply waited in the long silence that followed, and then Soi slowly turned and let the cloak fall from her shoulders.

Yui made no move to get up. She did not need to, because the gaping wound in the other woman's abdomen was visible from where she sat. The blood had seeped, dark red and thick, from the wound into the clothing around it, and there was a gleaming of white bone. She turned her face away.

"I died for him," Soi said quietly, "because I loved him. I know I should not have loved him, but the heart is always stronger than the head, unfortunately." There was the soft whisper of cloth as Soi folded the cloak back around her. "Forgive me for what I did tonight."

"You did nothing wrong," Yui whispered. "I...what you showed me is all familiar to me, though it still doesn't make sense. But it doesn't matter what I want to know or don't want to know. If I want to get home again, if I ever want to see Miaka again...first I have to remember what I came for."

"There is not-" Soi began, and then she stopped, cocked her head as if listening. "Your friend is home," she said. "I must go."

"No," Yui almost pleaded, reaching out a hand. "Don't go yet, Soi."

Soi made a half-bow. "Yui-sama, you will see me again. Be well until I return." She paused. "And leave the clam alone, if you know what's good for you."

The door swung open and Yui instinctively shied away from the glare of the hallway lights, throwing one arm over her eyes as the familiar tread of Kaika's boots clattered into the room. "I've got-" he began, and then stopped. "Yui?"

"Please close the door," she said. "It's very bright."

She felt his bewilderment as he did so, heard the click as the door swung into place, then the thud of a bag falling to the floor, and he was beside her, gathering her into his arms. "Yui, what happened? Yui! Talk to me!"

She drew a deep, shuddering breath and wiped the worst of the tear tracks from her cheeks as she gazed into his face, so familiar and worried and warm that she felt her eyes well up all over again, and she buried her head into his shoulder and sobbed. His arms tightened around her, and he stroked her hair. "Yui," he said, "Yui. Yui, tell me what happened. Are you hurt? Did someone come in while I was gone?"

I locked the door, she knew he was thinking, and she did her best to shake her head. "It's all right, Kaika. I'm all right. I was...I was trying to remember," she finally said, not knowing how else to put it, and she remembered Soi's lips on hers and then Kaika's face amid the crackling of the fire but which had not been his face. Who, then?

She raised her head, gazing up at him again in the dark through her tears. He looked back at her with confusion and fear in his eyes, and as his hands reached up to cover hers, she remembered that the name of the boy with Kaika's face who had tried to save her was Suboshi.


	6. Part Six: Kaika

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
_

* * *

**  
Sonzai (Existence)  
Six: Kaika**

"I had a dream," Yui said. "It was a really bad dream. I'm glad you came back, Kaika."

He knew she was lying somehow, but far be it from him to pry into a woman's motives when there was apparently no need to. She did not seem hurt, and the way she clung to him spoke of a distress more emotional than physical, so he simply sat and held her, let her sob quietly and whispered what he hoped were soothing words into her ear.

Her sobs slowly ceased, became the occasional hiccupping breath, and he eased her back against the bed, not quite sure what to do as her large, dark eyes roamed his face uncertainly as if searching for something that was not there. This unnerved him, so he swallowed and finally rose, went to the corner where he'd dropped his bag of food when he came in the door. The fruit was a little bruised, he thought, examining it in the moonlight, but the noodles had been securely packaged and still warm.

"Are you hungry?" he said finally.

She sniffled, and he realized he was not supposed to hear that, pretended that he did not. "A little bit," Yui said. "What did you buy?"

He brought the noodles and fruit over to her and handed her chopsticks to go along with it, then went over to the desk to relight the candle which had somehow gone out during his absence. Probably the wind from the open window. "Are you cold?" he said anxiously, one hand reaching out to close it. But she shook her head.

"No, leave it open. I like hearing the people outside."

A particularly loud burst of laughter rang from a street or two away, and he relaxed a bit, removed his hand from the latch. "If you say so," he said, and went to sit beside her and eat his own food while watching her eat, not convinced that she was entirely unhurt. He was startled when she put down her chopsticks and reached out one hand to squeeze his shoulder.

"I'm all right," she said softly. "Really. But thanks for thinking of me."

He was glad it was dark so she could not see his blush. "I just worry about you," he said. "A lot. A lot more than I should, I guess, considering I haven't even known you a month, but...I - I like you, Yui." He winced. That had not come out at all how he had wanted it to, had not even wanted to say it, but there it was. He held his breath, wondering how she would respond.

He was beginning to think she was ignoring him, but finally she said, "I don't deserve all this, Kaika."

"What are you talking about?"

She shook her head, finishing the last of her noodles and setting the wrapping down on the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees. "I don't deserve all this. Not your kindness, not you. I've done some bad things, Kaika. You wouldn't want to be around me if you knew."

"I don't care," he said fiercely, shoveling food into his mouth as if the mere act would remove the barriers that stood between the two of them. "I don't care, Yui. You're here now, with me, and that's what matters. Not what happened in the past, not that you can't remember it!"

"And what about you?" she returned bitterly. "Doesn't it bother you that you can't remember either?"

He took a deep breath, ready with a rebuttal, when it hit him that she was right. He dropped the chopsticks into his unfinished meal, looked away. "That's not fair," he said.

"It's the truth, though." He felt her warm hands take his. "I don't mean to hurt you, Kaika. I just wanted you to know. That I can't live a lie anymore. That I need to go back to whatever I did in the past, and to make it right."

He raised his eyes to hers, hardly daring to hope for any sort of answer when he said, "I don't suppose...that journey could include me too?"

When she didn't respond, he scooted closer and saw that she was about to cry again, pulled her close to him and pressed his lips to her forehead in a burst of emotion. "I can't promise anything," he whispered. "But as much as I am able, for all that I am and all that I want to be, I'll protect you, Yui."

She shivered, and then she was pressing herself into his chest, as if by the sheer act of touching him everything would be made right. There was nothing else he knew how to say, nothing else that was truer and from the heart, so he simply held her and let her cry.

She drifted off to sleep in a bit, snuggled up against his shoulder, worn out from crying. He tucked her into bed and cleaned up the remnants of their dinner, throwing it back into his pack by the door. He was blowing out the candle when something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, and he smelled the acrid smell of smoke from the candle's wick as he bent down.

It was the clam shell, the one they'd found at the bottom of Soi's money bag. How had it gotten there? he wondered, picking it up. Yui had put it in her pocket on a whim, and it might have fallen out during the ordeal this evening, the events of which she still had not relayed to him. He heaved a sight and turned the shell over in his fingers. It was such a drab thing, quite useless, really. He should throw it out with the trash.

But something stopped him, so he placed it on the table by the candle and closed the window. There was only one bed, and he had told Yui he would sleep on the floor when they had taken the room, but she looked so tiny amid the white sheets, lonely and cold. He chewed on his lip, trying to tell himself not to be silly. He'd sleep on the floor, just like he told her.

As he stood there debating, Yui rolled over slightly, and a small whimper escaped her lips. No. He couldn't sleep on the floor and leave her there alone. What if she woke during the night and was afraid? It wasn't like they hadn't slept together in the same bed before, he thought, and with that he shed his shoes and crawled in gingerly next to her, wondering if she would awaken with all the movement he made. But she did not, simply nestled her head into the crook of his arm as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

His last thought before he fell asleep was that there seemed to be some sort of odd light coming from the direction of the candle, where he had placed the shell. But no, it was just moonlight through the window, he told himself, and closed his eyes, feeling the slow, measured rise and fall of Yui's breathing under his arm.

The sun was streaming in when he awoke, and he was startled when he opened his eyes and saw Yui looking down at him, but she was smiling. "The sun's been up for almost three hours, Kaika," she said teasingly. "Slept enough yet?"

He sputtered something and blinked at her, then remembered the events of last night and that he had decided to sleep there on the bed in case she was afraid in the middle of the night. But she did not seem angry, and all that he could see as a memory of the night before was a little puffiness around her eyes as she peered at him. It was a moment before he realized she had been talking.

"What?" he said, a little stupidly.

"I said," Yui repeated, "is there any breakfast?"

He stretched, yawned and then threw back the sheets to stumble over to the pack and pull out more of the fruit he had bought last night. "You can have this," he said. "and then we can go out and see what they're selling for breakfast."

She caught the fruit neatly as he tossed it to her. "If the stalls haven't closed by the time we leave," she said, but he caught the laugh in her voice and smiled sleepily at her.

They made it out of the inn in another five minutes, just enough for him to take a sip of water and slick his hair back so he did not look like he had just rolled out of bed. "I wish there was some water for me to take a bath," Yui said wistfully, and he agreed with her. But inns did not carry that sort of luxury, and the river was a half an hour's walk away, so he simply adjusted the pack on his back and consoled himself with the thought that he did not smell any worse than most of the people they were passing by.

They ate breakfast in front of a small stall selling rice porridge. He would have preferred some Konan-style dishes, but no one seemed to be selling that. The porridge was a decent substitute, and he hadn't realized how hungry he was until he swallowed his first spoonful. The buzz of conversation around the marketplace was jovial, and he swallowed his porridge slowly, enjoying the taste until something caught his attention and he stopped in mid-mouthful, listening. There were two men talking, he realized, standing behind him. He looked at Yui, but she did not appear to notice.

"- the new emperor," said one of them, and the other man said something too low to hear. "It's not that at all," said the first, "and I'm not advocating revolution or insubordination or anything along those lines. Not by a long shot."

Kaika frowned as the second man said something else, and the first gave a sigh. "Well, what can you do?" he said. "Times are changing."

He perked up his ears for a reply, but instead, there was none, and when he looked back, the men had gone, melted back into the crowd. He had reached down to take another spoon of porridge when he saw Yui watching him.

"Did you hear that?" he asked, and she nodded grimly.

"That's why I came back."

He stared at her. "I don't understand," he said, and she jerked her head in the direction of the road.

"Are you done? Walk with me."

He shoveled down the rest of his meal at record speed and jumped up from his chair to follow Yui, who had already left the stall at a slow walk. He wondered if this would be a repeat of last night, but she seemed calm enough, if pensive. "What did you want to say?" he ventured, after she made no sign that she was going to initiate a conversation.

She looked around to both sides, but they were on a relatively deserted side road with young sapling trees on both sides, and he could not see anyone around. This seemed to reassure her, and she turned to him, drawing a deep breath.

"Nakago is the new Kutou emperor," she said.

At that name, a stake of fear drove through his heart, though he had no idea why. What was Nakago to him? Why did that name make him so afraid? He had no answer to that, but Yui was watching him closely, and it was too late to hide the expression on his face. "How?" he said.

She shook her head. "That's part of what I was trying to...remember...last night. I don't know how it happened. But somewhere between what I did in the past and when I woke up in the Kutou palace dungeon, Nakago killed the old emperor."

"Dungeon?" he echoed, shocked.

Yui looked around again, and then simply stopped walking. He had taken several paces forward already when he realized she was no longer next to him, so he stopped too but made no effort to backtrack. His face was hot and his heart beat rapidly in his chest with an emotion that he finally identified, a little dazedly, as anger.

"Kaika," she said softly.

He clenched his fists at his sides. "What right," he said, "did that bastard have to put you in a dungeon? What did you ever do to him? All he did was use people and then throw them away!"

"Kaika, don't be angry," she said. "I got out of there, didn't I?"

"And what," he ground between his teeth, "did Nakago do to you to get you out?"

She was quiet for a brief moment before she said, "He sold me to a slave trader."

The sound in his ears was the thrumming of heat waves above the pounding of his heart and a nameless emotion that swelled within his chest. "I'll kill him," he said.

"Kaika-"

"He hurt you," he continued mechanically, noticing abstractly that his arms were trembling. "I can't forgive that. I can't forgive the ones who hurt you, Yui-sama." The throbbing was moving now, traveling from his chest up to his shoulder, and his upper right arm hurt, like it was on fire. "I'll kill him."

"Kaika, please. Kaika, listen to me!"

"Get away from me!" he growled, and the world flared up around him as he fell to his knees, the pain in his shoulder acute and overwhelming now. But that did not matter. All that mattered, he knew, was Nakago. Because Nakago had hurt Yui, and therefore he deserved to die. Deserved to die. Deserved.

"Kaika!"

He raised one shaking hand to clamp over his upper right arm, and cried out, jerking it away. The flesh there was hot like a brand, but he could not stop himself, raised his hand again and tore at the place with his fingernails, trying to stop the burning somehow, some way. He did not quite know how it happened, if the fabric of his shirt was simply old and too-often washed, or if he had managed to get at a seam, or perhaps it was something else as there was a tearing sound and the top portion of his right sleeve tore completely off, fluttering to the ground.

From his arm, a blue light. A written character, pulsing blue-white-hot.

_High spirits._

He gazed at it, stricken, suddenly terrified as he lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, striking his head on the hard surface of the road. The pain lanced through him and he raised his hands automatically to clutch at his head, hearing dimly the patter of feet. Yui.

"Kaika, are you all right?"

He lay there, not trusting himself to speak. Little by little the pain receded, and he found himself able to open his eyes. Yui was leaning over him anxiously, one cool hand placed over his forehead, but he jerked his head away and frantically looked back down at his right arm.

The sleeve was still torn, but the character had vanished.

When he looked back at Yui, she was staring at his arm too with a frightened and yet suddenly understanding expression on her face. "You saw it too," he accused. "the character on my arm."

"I..." she said, and then said nothing more. He did not know what she was going to say, didn't really care. The gates of memory creaked inside his mind, and perhaps if the character had remained on his arm for a second more, if Yui had not come running towards him, he might have begun to remember. He didn't know if he was angry that he had not, because he had realized in that instant that he had not wanted to remember.

I've done some bad things, Yui had said, and for the first time, it struck him that that statement did not apply just to Yui alone.

"Kaika," Yui's voice said, in the air above him somewhere and he flung his right arm up over his eyes. No. He did not want to hear it. Did not want to hear her, the judgment that was sure to follow after what she had seen.

But instead, she simply said, "I think we should go back."

They made the walk back to the inn in silence, and upon reaching the room, she led him inside and closed the door, and then said, "I think it might be best if you went back to bed."

He did not argue with her, feeling too worn out to even say a word, so he did as she asked, crawling between the sheets and burying his face in the mattress. There was no way he could fall asleep, he knew, but that was not what she wanted to hear. Perhaps she would go out and leave him alone and then he could lie there and try and sort out what had happened.

But suddenly the bed squeaked a bit and she was there sitting next to him, pulling his head into her lap. His arms moved of their own accord to take hold of her, clinging to her like a drowning man, and she leaned forward to rest her head against his.

"What was that?" he murmured after a long while, and she responded, "I'm not sure. But-"

He caught the hanging end of her sentence. "But?"

She swallowed. "Nakago had it too. A character. His was on his forehead. I remember it appeared...when he was angry." He could not suppress the involuntary shudder that came with the mention of that name, and she squeezed his hand lightly. "His character was 'heart,' but it glowed the same as yours."

"Who am I?" he whispered in bewilderment. "What happened to me, and how did I end up in Sairou?"

Yui shook her head. "If I could answer that for you, I'd have my own memory back," she said. "I wish I could."

He must have finally dropped off to sleep after that even though he had not felt tired, because when he opened his eyes again it was evening and Yui had gone. He lay there for a little while watching the shadows on the walls, then got up and went to the window, opened it. The normal night-time street noises filtered in and as he turned, he saw that she had left a note on the table.

I'm going to find dinner, she wrote. If I'm not here when you wake up, don't go anywhere. I'll be back soon.

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the night air, as if simply by doing that he could cleanse his body and his mind of all that had happened in the last three weeks. He was almost hesitant to look down at his arm, but when he did so, there was no character, only sunbrowned, firm skin and muscle. Sighing, he turned to go back to bed when something next to Yui's note caught his attention.

Picking up the clam, he weighed it in his hand. It was the same as when he had pulled it out of the bag - light, airy, almost hollow-feeling. He felt a bit silly playing with a clamshell, but the silliness was overlaid with something grave, just like the feeling he had gotten that had stopped him from throwing the shell into the trash with the rest of their food garbage. Odd.

He had moved to put the shell back down when he realized that it was warm.

There had been enough paranormal incidents in one day, and he tried to drop it, to throw it from his hand, but no matter how he tried, the shell seemed not to budge. It was stuck to his palm, he realized with rising panic as he banged it against the desk until his hand ached, to no avail. He was raising his hand to try again when he froze. He did not know how he knew, but he was no longer alone in the room.

"Yui?" he said. "Soi?" But even as he spoke the names he knew it was neither of them, that this was someone entirely different, someone new, but the feel of this new person was not unfamiliar to him, either. He had met this person somewhere before.

"Where are you?" he snarled, spinning around, trying to peer into the dark corners of the room. But he was no cat, and all he saw were shadows. "Show yourself!"

Instead of an answer, all he got was the same rising heat within his chest that he had felt this morning. But he was prepared this time; he had been caught unaware the first time, but now, when his arm began to throb, he knew it was coming, caught the sensation of throbbing and held it. It was energy, he saw now, just pure energy, and if he could somehow harness that energy and prevent it from being released through his arm by directing it elsewhere, it could be put to use.

It took him about two seconds to realize that the blue glow filling the room was streaming forth from his right arm.

He reached out, exploring the corners of the room, but the presence was intangible and all the corners were empty, though he could feel a faint malevolence all around. "Come out!" he hissed. "You can't hide. I know you're there!"

There was a brief moment's hesitation. His breathing was heavy in the stillness, and suddenly he saw that with each breath he exhaled, the air before him lit up with a faint blue light, like glowing smoke. Inhale. Exhale. The character throbbed on his arm and his heartbeat was like drumming in his ears. The thought came to him that perhaps he could use his breath somehow, not knowing what good that would do except that it was blue too, like his arm, and that meant that it held the same sort of power. Still unsure of what he was doing, he breathed in deeply and then blew it out in a long, steady breath. A stream of blue light curled through the air, and as he watched, it spiraled toward him, twining around him in a floating ribbon.

He felt a faint uncertainty in the presence that was still lurking somewhere undefined in the darkness, and then surprise and a flash of disbelief. "Show yourself," he said, projecting as much authority into his voice as he could. His mouth felt numb, but there was power there he had not used, and this breath that he blew out was sharp, biting, with a cutting edge that the other one had not had, and he felt the presence shift, though it still did not speak. There was still something missing, he thought, fumbling toward his belt until his hand touched something.

His flute.

But before he could raise it to his lips, there was a noise from somewhere and he saw two booted feet appear, then the elaborate costume, the eyes glittering from the pale face, the trailing feathers of the headdress that he recognized as if in a dream.

"Tomo," he said in horrified wonder, and he saw the shock in the amber eyes staring out at him from the darkness.

"Amiboshi?"


	7. Part Seven: Yui

Hi guys, sorry I haven't updated in a while. Thanks for all the feedback! Enjoy!

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

Sonzai (Existence)  
Seven: Yui

She had left the marketplace and was making her way back to the inn with a sack full of fruit and rice pudding when the feeling began.

It was not a feeling she could pinpoint, not an emotion of any sort she could remember feeling before, but just the thought planted in her mind that something was very, very wrong, and a feeling deep down in her stomach that told her that her instinct did not lie.

Kaika, she thought in panic, and began to run.

The streets were especially crowded, as it was time for the evening meal, and she pushed her way through the tightly packed crowd, stepping on feet and shoving her elbows in people's faces with hurried apologies, not looking back even when one upset old man began cursing and swearing at her. I'm sorry, she thought to herself, but there is not enough time for me to explain. Please understand.

When she finally broke free of the crowds she was only two streets from the inn, and she pounded down the dirt road, her pack dragging at her back like it was filled with rocks. Even though the night was cool, she felt sweat pouring down her face and back. Please let me be in time, she prayed. Please let Kaika be all right. It was her fault...she should not have left him alone after what had happened this morning.

She reached the inn door and dashed across the common room, taking the stairs two at a time as the feeling pounded through her blood and her head swam. There was a faint blue light streaming all around the landing, she saw in a fright. Kaika was in danger.

"Don't go in there!"

Yui gasped, almost fell down the stairs as she tried to jump back at the sound of the voice, which had come out of the air very close to her ear. But it was not a demon, or a storybook phantom, she realized. It was Soi, standing there at the top of the stairs, arms crossed and looking tense. "What's happening in there?" Yui gasped.

Soi narrowed her eyes. "You wait here," she said. "I'll handle this." And before Yui could say anything else, she glided across the wooden platform and disappeared.

The blue light flared briefly, and Yui clung to the side of the narrow staircase, trying not to look at the shadows that crowded thick and close around her, made all the more intense by the blue light that was now streaming in thick rays across the floor, like concentrated sunshine. She heard shouting, a male voice, a female voice. And then Kaika's voice, defiant. She could not hear the words.

What have I done? she thought to herself in a cloud of despair, and suddenly she thought of the clam shell that she'd left sitting on the floor by the bed. Why hadn't she had the presence of mind to put it into her pocket after Soi had gone? Why had she just left it there and forgotten about it? It wasn't like her. Kaika must have found it, and if anything happened to him, it would be her fault once again.

She was always hurting the people she loved.

She did not notice when the blue light ceased, when the voices stopped, when the door creaked open and the boy came carefully down the stairs to shake her shoulder gently. She heard his voice murmuring low and soft in her ear, but her head felt very heavy and it took such effort to turn, to look into his face and try to decipher the haunted look in his eyes that had not been there before.

"It's safe to come up now, Yui," Kaika said.

She didn't say a word, simply pushed herself up from the stair on which she sat, climbed the last few steps laboriously, and entered the room.

It looked the same as it had before, when she had left him sleeping this afternoon, but she could feel something different. A vestige of power, almost like a fine residue of dust, scattered over everything she set her eyes upon. She walked over to the bed with a great weariness, removed the pack from her shoulders, and sat down on the mattress.

"Yui," said a woman, and she looked up to see Soi watching her.

"I'm sorry," Kaika said after a moment. "It was my fault. I shouldn't have."

She swallowed. "You picked it up, didn't you? The clam shell."

She thought that Soi would say something, perhaps imprint upon her that her carelessness and self-assurance had almost gotten Kaika killed, or worse, but the other woman said nothing. "Yui," Kaika ventured, not answering her question, but she realized after the words left his mouth that by asking his own question he was affirming her guess. "Do you remember Tomo?"

The name sent a chill through her, and a face swam before her eyes, golden eyes glaring out at the world with dangerous serenity, a firecracker waiting to explode, a white face enveloped all in black and red, like a bloody corpse. She looked up at Soi urgently, but Soi still stood there silent, watching. "Say something," Yui snapped with more hostility than she had intended. "I know you know what's going on. You're being unfair to Kaika."

"Am I?" Soi returned, as her gaze shifted to the boy who stood with head bowed beside the bed.

"I did pick up the shell, Yui," Kaika said softly. "I...don't know why I did so. It was just a clam shell, after all, something so simple I would normally have left it alone. But something about it called to me." He blinked. "That's what happened to you last night. You picked it up too, didn't you?"

"What is that thing?" Yui whispered. "Soi, what is it?"

"Your friend did pick it up." Soi moved out of the shadows as she spoke, her gaze going to Kaika almost unwillingly, and Yui noted how he jerked his head away to avoid meeting her eyes. "When he did so, he disturbed the thing sleeping within, and it awakened. If he'd been just an ordinary human being, he would probably have been killed."

Yui remembered the blue symbol glowing on Kaika's shoulder and said nothing.

"There was a man," Kaika said. "I don't know how I knew his name, but I did. It's like how I knew Nakago's name. Like how I knew-" he stopped and sat down heavily on the bed.

He was so close, yet so very far away, Yui thought, and she wanted to move to him and take him in her arms and tell him that she was here and it would be all right, but yet how could she? How could she penetrate into the private hell that he was now living, lost in his own memories? She knew something of that, and yet she knew also that her memories diverged from his in ways that he could never know. She looked back up at Soi then, remembered the gaping bloody wound through her chest, and something clicked inside her thoughts.

"The war you spoke of," Yui said slowly, seeing the gray eyes lock onto her own as she spoke and knew that she was on the right track. "You weren't the only one who helped Nakago, were you?"

Kaika shuddered, and Soi said, almost inaudibly, "No. No, I wasn't."

Yui let her head fall forward, to cup her chin in both hands, elbows resting on her thighs. The world had become very dark around her, with Soi the only spot of light in the room. "Why?" she said thickly. "Why did I do it, Soi? What happened to me?"

She felt Soi move close, felt the ghostly hand ripple through her with the same cool breeze as before. "I think you were hurt very badly," Soi whispered. "That you needed something to believe in, and you had it all taken away from you. It was the same with us - with all of us, I think. Even Nakago. With you and me and...Kaika." She spoke the name as if it were a foreign word, and Yui heard it.

"Soi. Who is Kaika?"

She knew as she asked the question that perhaps she would hurt him, but it was very possible that he remembered more than he thought he did. What exactly had happened in this room behind the closed door, she wondered, while the blue light streamed out into the stairway beyond?

But Soi did not answer, instead kneeling beside Kaika and stroking his hair with the same gentle touch that had caressed her cheek. "Kaika picked up the shell and summoned its master," she said. "I felt their chi the moment he did so. I don't know what might have happened if I hadn't, though from what I observed, Tomo was as surprised to see your friend as he was surprised to find that there was a person connected with the clam shell."

"And where is Tomo now?"

"He vanished," Kaika said, "when he saw Soi." But there was something in his voice that didn't sound right, and where there should have been a note of relief there was only frustrated grief. "I saw...Soi try to push me away. And I tried to touch her, and..."

She did reach out this time, but when her hand touched his shoulder, he jerked away. Her arm fell forward, hand hitting the bedsheets, as Kaika said, "He called me Amiboshi."

"Amiboshi," she said wonderingly, feeling again like crying as the name wrapped itself around her memory and jogged something loose, only a small puzzle piece, but it was enough. She saw again the vision that Soi had shown her, saw the face of the boy who was Kaika but not Kaika, and then heard someone intone fiercely, I love you, Yui-sama!

"I remember now," she whispered. "Suboshi was your brother."

Kaika collapsed with a soft cry and she pressed her hands to her mouth, terrified that she had forced him over the brink of some memory he had wanted to forget, and yet she still could not bring herself to touch him. "Soi," she said instead. "Soi. Oh gods."

The other woman moved forward almost gingerly, bending down, and then she said, "You didn't hurt him. He'll be all right. But I think we'd better stop it right there for now. You two should get some sleep, and then in the morning we'll be leaving."

Yui stared at her. "Are you coming with us?"

"I think I'd better," Soi said grimly, and Yui looked at Kaika again, finally gathering the courage to scoot across the bed and prop his head up on her knee, holding him tightly. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, she saw, and his shoulders gave little involuntary twitches, as if there were pictures before his eyes that he was seeing that he did not want to see.

"Kaika," she whispered into his ear. "Kaika, wake up." No response. She stroked his cheek, brushed her lips across his forehead. Her eyes were full of tears, and one of them fell, splashed onto the bridge of his nose. "Please wake up," she said, and then his eyes sprang open and he jerked against her, crying out as she tried to hold him down.

"Yui," said Soi urgently, but she was holding him, rocking him and crying. His body spasmed and then he sagged in her arms.

"Kaika," she said. "Kaika, it's me. It's Yui, Kaika, please."

A soft intake of breath, and then hesitantly, "Yu-Yui?"

She held him for a very long time. Only after he had fallen asleep with his head still in her lap did she look up and realize that Soi was gone.

The morning was cloudy, and she woke to find that Kaika was still sleeping, his hair mussed over his face and dark circles under his eyes even in the morning light. She got out of bed soundlessly and moved over to the pack to fish out last night's uneaten dinner, chewed on a piece of fruit as she glanced around the room once more. It seemed almost mockingly harmless in the gray morning, as if nothing had actually happened and it had all been one long dream.

No, she thought, swallowing the bite of fruit she was chewing and turning her wrist over in her hand to trace one of the long, narrow scars there. It was not a dream.

"Yui?"

She almost dropped the fruit in her haste to stand up, dashing over to the side of the bed. "You're awake," she said breathlessly. "Are you all right? Does anything hurt?"

Kaika winced as he sat up, running one hand through tousled hair. "So it wasn't a dream," he said. "I was almost hoping that when I woke up, you would tell me it was just a nightmare and that nothing had really happened."

She smiled sadly and held out the fruit to him. He stared at it, then took a small bite. "No," she said. "It's not a dream. Sometimes I wish it was." Hearing in her words the echo of something she had said to him what seemed years ago. _Sometimes, I wish I had died._ And then his reply back to her.

_Sometimes, I think I have died._

He drew a long breath. "Well, it's all right." He ran his hand through his hair again before he said, "I did have dreams last night. Actually, just one dream, but every time I thought was going to wake up, the dream would repeat over again and I couldn't wake."

"I would have shaken you awake if I'd known," she said, but he shook his head.

"No. I...dreamed about...him." Twisting his hands in his lap, twining them through the bedclothes as if the sheets were strips of linen bandages across scars on his hands. "About my brother."

She did drop the fruit then, and it landed with exposed flesh down, red juices spreading across the sheets like blood as she gripped his hand. "You remember?"

"Not enough. But even that is too much." His breathing was labored. "Can we not talk about this anymore? I need some time to think. You know, before I say anything else about it."

"I'm sorry," she said automatically, moving to stand up, and his hand tightened on hers.

"No, Yui, don't be sorry. You've nothing to be sorry about."

They packed in silence and she gave him the rest of the fruit to gnaw on as they departed the room for the last time. She'd tried to scrub out as much of the fruit stain from the sheets as she could, though a vestige still remained. She hoped the inn owners would not think it was blood after all, and when she was done scrubbing, she left a note on the table next to the candle in explanation.

The clam shell they had both stared at before Yui put out one hand and dropped it into her pocket. There had been no question, she thought as they descended the stairs and left the inn, that she would be taking it with her. It was not a plaything, but yet she felt that it had its own story that had not been fully told, and until she had confronted the shell's master, it would remain with her.

She was not surprised to see Soi waiting for them where the village ended and forest began. The other woman looked as she always did, gray eyes watching them steadily under the cloak's black hood. Kaika stiffened beside her as they came up to meet her, but he said nothing as they stopped and Yui nodded slightly.

"Good morning," she said.

"It will rain tonight," Soi said. "We'd better try and cover as much ground as we can before it starts pouring. It'll be a wet evening."

Kaika muttered something darkly under his breath that Yui didn't catch, and which she didn't think he would care to repeat. Instead, she said, "Where are we going?"

"Well," Soi said, turning her face up slightly as if sniffing the wind. "the Kutou capital lies about four days east of here. I was assuming that's where we were headed. Unless you have a different destination in mind?"

Yui caught the "we," thrown casually into the sentence as if Soi had put no more thought into saying the word than it took for her to stand there, or to put one foot in front of the other as they began to walk, away from the village towards where the mountains loomed like rows of giant, jagged tombstones in the distance. "Thank you," she said.

Soi simply smiled.

The ground grew steadily rockier the farther they traveled, and she fell twice, once tripping on a stone that rolled unexpectedly when she stepped on it, and the next time stumbling against Kaika as he took the path ahead of her on a sloping hill paved with loose pebbles. She'd grabbed onto one of his legs and he had almost fallen himself, before reaching down and pulling her up. "I seem to be losing the ability to walk," she said a bit breathlessly when she had recovered, and Soi had raised one eyebrow.

"It gets rockier," she said. "And it'll be growing dark soon too. We need to hurry if we want to find any shelter before the rain."

As if in ominous portent, a clap of thunder followed her words, and Yui glanced up at the sky, surprised to find that the clouds rolling in were not the fluffy, slightly overcast gray of the morning. These clouds were dark, almost black, and as she watched, a flicker of lightning lept from one rolling billow to another, disappearing in the shadows of its enormous bulk.

"That doesn't look good," Kaika said, tugging at her hand, which she realized he was still holding after her near-fall. She didnâ€™t mind, and as they began walking again, rather unsteadily, she gripped it tightly as if his fingers would help her find her way.

The gravel grew steadily looser and sharper as they continued upward. They were no longer on the flat plains that had been the landscape outside the village, she realized suddenly. The ground had been rising for a while, and she stopped, squinted upward through the clouds and heavy fog that had begun to roll in, and found that she could make out a mountain peak quite near. She hadn't thought that the mountains had been this close.

"Is anything wrong?" Soi called, and Yui shook her head.

"I'm fine. Just trying to see where we're going."

"We'll have plenty of time for that later," the other woman said, and Yui watched her form as she glided almost effortlessly across the rocky path. Soi was walking, putting one foot in front of the other as she and Kaika were both doing, but where the two of them scrambled and slid and dislodged one small stone after another, Soi's strides were long and graceful, a swan's passage across clear water. Soi could very easily make her way across this mountain range before the night fell, Yui thought, and suddenly felt embarrassed, ashamed that such a woman as Soi was doing this all for her, a mere girl who had lost her memory and was only trying to find her way home.

Penance, Soi had said.

They had almost reached the top of the hill when the rain started to fall. It began as a drizzle, tiny trickles of water that nuzzled up against her face and clothing almost playfully, and as they crossed the hilltop and began their decent, the drizzle increased into a sprinkle. The cool water was pleasant against her hot skin, but the world was gray and the water was gray and the path was gray also, and the dusk was gray, and she could not quite see where she was going.

"We might want to see if there's a stand of trees or clump of rocks we can take shelter in," Soi was saying, when Yui lost her footing for what seemed the hundredth time. But this time was different from the other times, because the other times she had managed to recover her balance but this time when she struck out with her foot in hopes of finding solid ground, her foot struck empty air.

She fell.

She didn't know if she screamed or cried out, or if the fall had knocked the breath out of her. Whatever happened next was a blur as she found herself tumbling down the hill through rocks and brush and the rain getting into her eyes, splashing through small rivulets of rainwater that had accumulated in various crannies and pits in the well-worn rock. The thunder rumbled again and she hit her head against something hard, struggling to stay conscious as the world flashed before her eyes and everything hurt.

"Kaika?" she tried calling, but her voice was rough and hoarse, and as she reached out one hand to pull herself up against the rock she had fallen against, the sky opened up and it began to pour.

Don't panic, she told herself as the sheet of water hit her and she groped blindly for a handhold, a foothold, something to keep herself from being washed away. The ground sloped away under her feet, but there seemed to be some sort of solid wall to her right, and if she scooted back far enough, there was just enough hanging rock to make a small shelter. She shrank in as far as she could, trying to shield her face from the opening with her hands to stop the rain from lashing it with the almost razor-sharp droplets that were pelting from the clouds, so unlike the gentle drizzle from only a moment ago.

Her best bet was to stay here until the rain stopped and hope that she would be found. She had no doubt that she would be eventually, because Kaika was with Soi and Soi would have no problem finding her. She did not harbor any thoughts that she would be found before the rain let up. Soi would not leave Kaika alone, she did not think, and Kaika was in no condition to brave these conditions, even to search for her.

But she was cold and getting colder, and the rain did not look like it would cease any time soon. Miserably, she hunched up against her makeshift shelter and scrubbed at her wet face with already soaked sleeves. She was not crying, she told herself. She had cried too much already in the past few days, and she would not cry now. Kaika was with Soi, and safe. That was all that mattered.

Thunder crackled and the world lit up for a moment with the electric brightness of lightning, but even through it, all she could see was the steadily falling gray-white rain. The afterimage stung her eyes, and it was only after she had rubbed them several times that she realized it was quickly growing dark.

"I won't be scared," she said to the rock in front of her, trying to sound resolved and failing miserably.

She had buried most of her face in the crook of her arm and began to feel numbness creeping up her legs from the wet and the cold when she saw the light.

It was faintly bluish, almost white at first before it drew nearer and she could see the blue tint. Hallucination, she told herself at first, but when it did not disappear even after she had closed her eyes and shaken her head a few times, she cautiously raised her head to follow it.

It was heading her way.

She could hardly see through the rain, but when she squinted, she could see it swaying, almost like a lantern. But it was not a lantern. It could not be a lantern, because it was raining and the wind was too strong, and lanterns were red and gold, not blue. It was all wrong, her brain told her, but she did not care, because she was cold and numb and drenched.

"Help," she choked out.

She could make out the shape of something through the rain now, a faint shadow that resolved itself into human form as the light drew nearer, burning steadier than any lantern flame could ever burn, and it did not flicker. "Help," she called again, as loud as she could, and sneezed, hunching down against the rock and hoping that this person, whoever it was, would be a friend. The light did not feel malicious, not like the clam shell had, and her heart rose in her throat for a brief second.

There were no footsteps, but a pair of feet appeared in the circle of light just beside her rock, and she raised her eyes just as her visitor stepped into her field of vision.

It was a child.

She blinked, not quite daring to believe her eyes as the child stared up at her with a solemn expression in his large, dark eyes. He was dressed in simple robes, the rope sandals on his feet seeming sorely out of place in the downpour, his head shaven down to the barest hint of hair. The light, she saw now, was a glowing globe held in one of the child's outstretched hands, and it did not appear to be any sort of fire or anything else naturally made. It looked instead like a small, condensed ball of quivering lightning, bound into a sphere and resting in the boy's palm as if it belonged there.

They looked at each other, the child and the girl, and she had the strange sensation again that she had seen him before.

"Can you help me?" she mouthed. The sound of the rain seemed to fade in her ears as she whispered the words, not sure how this child could be of any assistance, though a part of her knew that this was no child.

He stared at her a moment longer, and then nodded.

She swallowed, wondering what to do next, when he inclined his head out towards the rain, in the direction from which he had come, and she grasped his meaning at once.

"You want me to follow you."

He nodded his head yes, again, and then stood there waiting. She hesitated for the briefest second before pushing herself away from the rock wall, shoving her wet hair out of her eyes. If worst came to worst, Soi would still find her, she told herself. One way or another, Soi would know. It was not like she had any other choice.

"Lead the way," she told the child.

He did not look back at her, but simply turned around and headed out into the rain, light held up high in his hand, so that she could see. She took a deep breath and followed.

The rain hit her with a tremendous force and she staggered, almost falling to her knees before her body adjusted enough for her to rise. Frightened that she had lost the light, she gazed wildly around for a moment before spotting the child quite near, watching her as she struggled to her feet and headed again in his direction. He did not attempt to help, but neither did he let himself move too far ahead. Instead, he was matching her pace, stopping when she stumbled and waiting again and again for her to catch up.

She did not wonder at this until they had been walking for what seemed like hours, when it struck her that no matter how often she fell, how often she tripped against unseen rocks, how slow she went, the child did not seem to be affected by any of it. His small feet trod steadily against the path, stepping smoothly through the ground that was rapidly becoming a river, and his eyes whenever he looked back at her were steady, grave and a bit mysterious, as if he knew something about this journey that she did not.

He walked, Yui thought suddenly, like Soi.

Before she could begin to process the significance of this thought and follow it to its conclusion, the child stopped.

"What-" she began, and then he pointed. Following the line of his finger, she looked up and saw, through the gloom, the dark mouth of a cave.

The child nodded his head again at her, and then pointed at the cave again.

"Is it safe?" she asked him, instinctively feeling a bit silly as she did so, because even if it was not safe, what choice did she have? She had followed him this far, and she was not about to turn all of that into nothing by choosing to remain out here in the rain. But yet she had to ask, because something about that cave disturbed her.

It was not fear, exactly. It was more like the feeling she had whenever she prodded at the locked door of her memories, the knowledge that everything lay within, if only she knew how to enter.

The child watched her expressionlessly, not affirming nor denying her question, not giving her any answer at all. Find out for yourself, his face seemed to say, and she took a deep breath.

"I'm going in."

He seemed to accept that answer, though his expression did not change, and as he raised the sphere of light again and stepped into the cave entrance, she followed him.


	8. Part Eight: Kaika

ï»¿ _Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Eight: Kaika**

"Yui!" he screamed, careless of the downpour, shielding his eyes from the worst of the rain and almost sobbing as he cried her name. "Yui! Yui!"

"She won't be able to hear you," snapped Soi. "Don't be a fool."

"I need to-"

"You don't need to do anything!" Her fierce voice sounded close to his ear and he stumbled back a step. She was standing before him all of a sudden, hands on her hips and looking frustrated and worried and furious all at once. "You won't be able to find her in this storm. We'll look for shelter and then after the rain stops, I'll go out and look for her."

"But she-"

"Yui-sama has been through much worse," Soi said flatly. "She'll survive."

He stared at her, almost unable to believe that she dared suggesting leaving Yui out in the rain to fend for herself. "Are you sure?" he choked out, and her expression softened a bit, which made him feel even worse. It was the sort of expression a mother might make to a crying child, or a patronizing parent comforting her son. He was no child.

"Fine," he said before she could say anything else. "We'll go find somewhere out of the rain."

If he could, he would have stomped on ahead of her so he could not see her at all, because he didn't think he could face her at the moment. But he could not see anything through the rain, and that would have been near suicide. Soi glanced at him, as if sizing him up, and then she said, "Follow me then."

Later, he remembered the journey only vaguely in his mind, as if the rain and the wind and the lightning around him had encased the world in a sort of impenetrable mist, and the only exit from that phantom world was Soi, her form moving steadily as if the drowned mountain pass they crossed was nothing but level marble pavement. If he had any doubt of the proof she had shown him last night, there was no reason to cling to it any longer as he watched her move, thought how ghostly she really did look, pale-white and flickeringly smooth against the sheets of rain. He felt clumsy and bloated in comparison as he spat rainwater out of his mouth and pushed sopping hair out of his eyes.

"I think we'll have some luck up here," Soi said, and he had scrambled forward a few more steps before he was aware that she had stopped and was peering uncertainly into the gloom.

"Soi?" he said. Anything that made her wary was worth a note.

She shook her head. "It's nothing. I think I see a cave or two that might do. Watch your step. We're going downhill."

There were three caves, Soi pronounced when they had navigated the downhill slope, and the nearest was big enough for the two of them. He knew that she included herself in the count simply because she knew he would not want to be left alone during the storm, that she did not need shelter nor food nor sleep, and he wondered again why she was doing all this.

He could barely see the cave entrance through the rain, but when he stumbled through it, it was like crossing from one world to the next. The sudden absence of beating rain and wind was disorienting, and while he was standing trying to get his bearing, he was aware of Soi at the mouth of the cave, looking out.

"Soi?" he said again. "What is it?"

A frown crossed her face, a wrinkling of the forehead so quick that he would have missed it if he hadn't been watching. "Yui-sama," she said, then shook her head. "Well, Yui is safe, for the moment, anyway. Though I wonder...?"

He wanted to grab hold of her shoulders and shake her, but of course he could not do so. "What happened to Yui?" he demanded instead. "Where did she go?"

"I can't tell." Soi frowned again, more deeply this time. "I can feel her only faintly. She is safely out of the rain, I know that much." Glancing down at him. "You'll have to take that for what it's worth, Ami-Kaika."

He didn't miss the slip of her tongue. "Don't call me that," he said quietly, and retraced his steps back where he had come, where the rain did not wet the rock floor and everything was dry and dark and still. He was in the process of taking off his shirt - or at least trying to take it off, since it seemed to be permanently stuck to his back now - when he heard a clatter and several somethings rolled to a stop at his feet.

"What's this?"

"Dry tinder," Soi said. "In case you want it."

He didn't answer, wrestling with his shirt until in a moment of despair, he gave up and tore it in half, shrugging out of it. The sleeve was ruined, anyway, and there was no use in trying to save it. He had an extra garment in his pack, but it was most likely wet now just like everything else. Instead, he reached for the wood, made quick work out of it until the flames were leaping at a decent height, then surveyed his surroundings.

The cave was much like any other - dusty rock floor, uneven ceiling pitted with gnarled formations. He peered into the back but there was no telling how far the cave extended inward, and now was probably not a good time for exploring. If Soi had pronounced it as safe, he was willing to believe her.

"The rain will stop by morning," she said, "so we can spend the night here and then head out tomorrow to where Yui-sama is."

"Why do you call her that?"

Soi turned away from the cave mouth, coming into the circle of firelight and taking a seat a few paces away, but she was still watching the rain. "You called her that once, too," she said finally.

He thought of the times when the suffix had come from his own mouth, uncalled for and unwanted, and he wanted to deny her statement, but could not. Instead, he stirred the fire, then leaned over to dig through his pack for the shirt that was only slightly wet, holding it up and wondering if the fire would dry it in a decent amount of time. But he had no clothes line.

"My parents pulled me out of the river in Sairou," he said, "and they've told me that I've been with them ever since. But sometimes when I think about the past year, and that I can't even remember waking up in their house after they saved me from the water...there was something, I think, that they left out."

"And what was that?" Soi asked quietly.

"I remember running away," he said. "I don't know why I ran away or what I ran for. I think there was someone I had to see, or something I had to run to. I've asked my parents and they've always denied it, but I think they're lying." He turned the shirt over in his hands for a moment more, then laid it carefully aside and looked down at his chest, at the ugly scars there that ran crisscrossing down to his abdomen and then up to his arms, as if he had been trapped in a web of wires and had tried to free himself. "I don't blame them. They just wanted to keep me, that's all. Maybe they even made me forget...if I were them, I would have done the same thing."

Soi twined her fingers around her knee, and her form wavered in the firelight, like a reflection on water. "All of us have, at one time or another, wanted people to stay with us. It's natural, especially when you know in the end that person will have to leave you."

He touched the scars on his chest once more before dropping his hand. "Soi," he said. "Tell me about my brother."

Her head came up and she stared at him with an expression akin to disbelief. He bit his lip, but didn't look away. She said, after a moment, "Are you sure?"

"I dreamed about him last night." He looked into the fire, as if its red-orange heart would give him some answers, but it simply crackled and spit at him. "There was a lake, I think. It was very still, and we were walking beside it, and I told him I had to leave. He cried. I don't...remember what I had to leave for, or where I was going, but there was something important I had to do, I told him, and then I would return. I think, even then, I knew perhaps I never would."

"Kaika."

"Is that what happened?" he demanded. "Soi, is that what happened? Why did I leave him? Why didn't I come back?"

She was staring out at the rain again. "You were sent out to accomplish something that no one else could," she said at last. "None of us were prepared for the possibility that you might die. None of were prepared when you...failed."

"What happened?" he pressed, but she simply shook her head.

"I still don't know. It was like you died, because we couldn't feel you anymore. But obviously you didn't. Didn't you say your parents pulled you out of a river? That might have been what happened instead. Whatever the case, we thought you had been killed."

"And my brother?"

"Your brother," Soi said, "was inconsolable. I was afraid he might try to kill himself in those days after we thought you had died. I think he did think about it. I think he..." she thought for a few seconds before she spoke again. "There are things he did that I don't think you should know. But I can tell you that he loved you very much. He never stopped loving you."

_Suboshi was...a friend. He died._

No, he had said to Yui. He can't have died. But even as Yui had spoken the words, he had known somewhere deep inside that it was the truth. He had already known it to be true long before she washed up on the shore of the river just as he had almost a year ago.

It was time, Kaika decided, to end the lie. If he wanted to continue to protect Yui, if he wanted to see her safe and happy, he would have to accept that in the end, their fates lay intertwined.

"Soi, how did my brother die?"

But Soi shook her head. "That, I can't tell you," she said. "I didn't see him die, because I was already dead."

"Oh," he said, unable to come up with a better answer, but when he looked at her, he saw she was smiling sadly.

"I died for Nakago," Soi said. "I died for him, like so many of the others did. Even Yui almost died for him, and it's a miracle she survived at all, much less survived unhurt. I underestimated her, I suppose, and I'm glad I did now, because it seems like she holds the key to our pasts and our futures."

"I don't understand," he said, seeing her gaze travel down to his chest and the scars there, feeling very naked before her bold eyes.

"Your brother loved Yui-sama. And even though I don't know how he died, I think I can say that out of all of us, he was the only one who didn't die for Nakago. Suboshi must have given his life protecting her, and I'm glad."

He didn't even notice when he had started crying, only that he tasted something warm and salty on his lips, and when he looked back at Soi, her form was blurred.

"You don't need to say anything," she told him gently when he tried to speak. "I won't force you to remember anything more. It will take time."

"Shunkaku," he said. "My brother's name was Shunkaku."

There was something else too, he thought fuzzily, something else that was eluding him at the moment, about why he and his brother had been tied to Yui and to this woman sitting across him from the fire, and even to Nakago who had sent them all to their deaths. The sound of the rain at the cave entrance broke into his thoughts, and he lifted his eyes to the thunderous gray curtain outside, because there was something about water. Water, as the faint glow of lightning pierced the sky. He found his eyes drawn back to Soi.

"Lightning," he began, then stopped, not knowing what else to say. "You were..."

She sounded almost amazed. "You remember?"

He shivered, and for a moment it seemed to him that the cave was lit up in blue, just like the ribbon of blue that had curled around him in the room of the inn as he had confronted Tomo, just like the glow of the blue character on his arm. "Seiryuu shichi seishi," he said slowly, carefully. "Soi."

He took a deep breath and felt his shoulders slump, exhausted. There was no sound but the rain and the crackling of the fire, and he pushed his still-damp hair out of his eyes, thinking of his brother who he still did not quite remember, and the realization that he too had been one of the chosen seven, and that Kutou's dragon god had called them to defend their nation and they had failed.

"Amiboshi," Soi's soft voice said, and for the first time, he did not try to stop her from saying that name. He had not liked that name, he remembered, but it had been one that he had carried for all his life because he had to, just as Shunkaku had been Suboshi because that was the fate they had been born to. "Amiboshi, don't be afraid."

"How did I forget?" he wondered, sounding even to his own ears lost and confused, like a child. "How could I have let my own brother go...?"

"War changes people," Soi said. "All of us learn to cope, in one way or another."

"I went to Konan," he said, seeing the images play before his eyes like scenes from a picture book, crude, unfinished portraits where some of the faces were blank and pages before and behind were missing. "My brother didn't want me to go, but I went because Nakago told me to. I...was going to stop some people who he said were enemies. But they weren't," he continued, feeling more certain now. "They weren't enemies, and I would have killed them without knowing." A strange sensation came over him. "Did I, Soi?"

"No," she said gently. "No, you didn't kill them. We thought they had killed you instead."

When I must have fallen in the river, he thought to himself, and he reached down to his belt to draw out his flute. It had gotten damp in the rain, but the bamboo seemed sound when he raised it to his lips and closed his eyes, thinking about the blue mist of his breath in the dark room and how he had almost managed to channel it, thinking about if only he had remembered his flute in time, he could have.

The first note swept over him like the rainstorm, full of pulsing energy. He shivered from the power of it and then let his fingers drift over the holes on the reed, moving with the memory that his mind did not have but that his fingers still remembered. A peaceful melody, he thought, a melody to revive the spirit and heal the soul, life energy to life energy. This was the song he had played when...when...

His fingers stopped.

"Go on," Soi said from somewhere in the darkness in front of his closed eyes, but he shook his head.

"I don't remember any more."

He felt her get to her feet and move again to the cave entrance. Standing watch, he thought, opening his eyes and tucking his flute back into his belt without a word. It was probably time to try and dry out his shirt, and then his pants too, which were still soaked through. He looked up at Soi and decided that it didn't matter whether or not she was looking. What could a ghost do?

She didn't seem fazed when he stripped his pants off and held both items of clothing in front of the fire, feeling the flames warm the wet material. The cave floor was very cold, and as his pants dripped into the rock floor next to the burning wood, he wondered if the rain would stop by the morning as Soi had said. There seemed to be no end to it.

"I was very fond of Suboshi," Soi said from her post by the entrance, and he started at the unexpected sound of her voice. "I began to think of him as somewhat of a little brother, I suppose, after you disappeared. I wish that there had been something more I could have done for him."

"He always was very impulsive," he responded. "I'm sure you did enough."

She smiled sadly at him. "Nothing is ever enough. You should know that."

His pants were a little damp still when he put them back on, but they would dry while he slept, he supposed, and he curled up on the rock as best as he could, staring up at the flames flickering on the ceiling. Soi had said she would watch the fire while he slept, that it was dangerous to sleep here alone in the dark.

"Good night, Soi," he said, and felt her reply drift almost soundless back to him across the curling smoke.

"Good night, Amiboshi."

He must have fallen asleep almost immediately, but when he opened his eyes, everything was dim, foggy and intangible, and he knew he was dreaming. Would he see his brother this time? he wondered, and found himself almost looking forward to seeing that face again. It was almost the face he saw every morning when he looked into the mirror, almost, except for the set of the jaw, the cast of his brother's eyes. Impulsive, he had told Soi, and he knew it was so, even though he didn't remember.

"Amiboshi."

The voice out of the fog was not his brother's. He shivered at the sound of it, the sound of a memory coming alive before his very eyes, and as he watched, a hand came out of the mist and beckoned to him. It was holding something, like a thick rod tied with a long, flowing ribbon.

"What do you want of me?" he asked.

"Amiboshi," the voice said again. "You will go to Konan-koku."

When he looked again, he realized the object the hand held was a bright red scroll.

"No," he said, trying to step back, but there was something preventing him from moving. "I can't go. I've got to stay here, with Shun. I can't leave Shun alone, Nakago-sama, surely you understand-!"

The hand closed over the scroll, and then the voice laughed. He trembled as blue light pierced the fog, blue light resolving itself into the shape of a character, flaring to life with the intensity of a beacon.

_Heart._

"No," he said again, and then he felt someone shaking him, and the fog was clearing and he felt the rough material of his pack under his chin, the hard rock floor under his back. His hip hurt.

"Aniki," the voice said. "Wake up."

"Shun?" he said sleepily. The hand shook his shoulder again.

"There's something happening outside, Aniki. Get up. Come on, get up."

He blinked, opening his eyes, and saw his brother crouched by his side, his head turned toward the cave entrance as if listening. "Shun?" he said again. "What are you doing here?"

"You need to get up," his brother said, and then his head swung back around to look down at him, and Shun smiled the same familiar playful, innocent smile he remembered, and his heart ached. "I'll be here if you need me, Aniki."

"What are you talking about?" he said, sitting up with a start, before realizing that the fire had burned low and the cave was darker and colder than before, and when he looked around, there was no one there.

"Amiboshi? Did you say something?"

It was Soi, still standing there at the cave entrance, and he rubbed his eyes, looking around again, sure that it had not been a dream. "There wasn't anyone else here a moment ago, was there? Did you call me?"

She cocked her head at him. "I've been here since you fell asleep. What's wrong? Bad dream?"

"No..." He gave his head a hard shake. It hadn't been Soi telling him to get up, after all. "I think something's not right." At her hard glance, he went on, "that must have been what woke me up."

"I don't-" she began, and then stopped.

He opened his mouth to ask the question and she held up one hand, swiftly and fiercely as if it were a sharp sword, and then he heard it too, the faint jingle of horse tack, the voices of men. The rain had let up, he realized then. It had gone from a downpour to a moderately heavy drizzle while he had been sleeping, and from the look of the sky, it was almost dawn.

Soi cursed.

There was no warning. Perhaps if he had been more in control of his surroundings, perhaps if he had more of his memory back and could control his unsteady powers, he would have sensed them before they found him and could have done something about it. But one minute the voices were muffled in the distance, and then the next he saw the forms of horses and riders emerge from the shadows, heard a shout of discovery, and he had nowhere to run.

"You, boy!"

The helmet was what he saw first, the heavily ornamented war helmet that he recognized somehow as the ones worn by war leaders and platoon commanders of Kutou. _Because you've seen them around the Imperial Palace_, his mind told him when he fell back a step, wondering where the knowledge had come from. He felt the faint hope stir in his breast that perhaps they were a simple warband gotten lost in the downpour and who happened to find the same shelter he had, but he knew in his heart that was not true.

How? he wanted to say, but even that question was snatched from him as he realized he knew how.

_Nakago._

"You're the one we want," another man said, and then he saw them appearing one by one to the mouth of the cave, surrounding the entrance so he could not escape. Even if he could, where could he go? "The emperor's been looking for you."

"He's not the emperor," he spat, and the leader of the band laughed coldly.

"Come with us quietly," the big man said, "and we won't hurt you."

He hesitated for the space of three heartbeats, eyes darting around the cave and already knowing that he would not find Soi there. She had vanished as soon as the first horse had come into view, and he felt suddenly angry that she would simply leave him there, but knew there was nothing she could have done. She was no longer a seishi but just another ghost trying to find her way home. There was nothing holding him back, then. He reached to his belt for his flute.

Several things happened, then. One of the men saw his gesture and gave a hoarse shout. At the same time, the leader's hand went to his sword hilt, and one of the horses reared. He whipped the flute out and pressed it to his lips, and then something knocked him off his feet and he went sprawling across the cave floor, the flute flying from his hand and skittering off into the darkness somewhere beyond.

"You make me do this the hard way, boy," the leader growled, and he saw the flash of metal, the tip of a sword, the bright gold of firelight reflecting in shining waves off the horse's armor as it reared again, and then someone cried out.

At first he thought it was himself, but it wasn't, after all. He waited for the fall of the sword strike which never came, because when the big man turned in his saddle with another shrill cry as the enormous form came flying out of the fog, it was already too late.


	9. Part Nine: Yui

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Nine: Yui**

The cave into which the child led her was small, but dry, and the blue light that glimmered softly into its darkest corners showed Yui that there was nothing here but pebbles and sand. She picked her way carefully across the floor, feeling for all the world like a soggy heap, a water skin that had somehow fallen onto the clean floor of some room and burst open.

"Thank you," she said gravely, turning around to face the child, who gave a slight bow and then simply stood there and watched her. It should have unnerved her, but strangely enough, she did not feel anxious.

There was nothing else to do, she decided, but to unpack. Everything inside the pack was wet, as she expected, and she took the items out one by one, laying them around the floor of the cave to dry. A blanket. A cloak. A change of clothing. This morning's leftover breakfast. A coil of rope. Her water bottle, though there was more water around here than she knew what to do with. Nothing seemed to be missing, and she shook out the bag itself as best as she could, feeling its rain-sodden material weigh heavy in her hands.

"Do you have to go soon?" she questioned, and the boy shook his head. She could see him much better in the dryness of the cave, so she sat back with her feet folded under her and examined him. He was not much taller than her hip, she decided, and the robes he wore were definitely Chinese. That and his shaven head and sandals would have marked him as a monk, but weren't monks older, almost grown men? Perhaps he was a young temple acolyte. She wondered briefly what temples there were around this place, then decided it didn't matter.

He let her study him for a moment, then as if deciding that she'd had enough, he turned away and walked to the cave entrance with slow, measured steps. She thought he would go back out in the rain, but he did not. Instead, he stopped at the cave's mouth and turned back to her again with the glowing ball of light still in his hands.

"Thank you," she said again. "For showing me here." If he heard her words, he did not acknowledge them. She wondered if he was mute. "Do you live around here?"

He seemed to consider her words for a moment, then shook his head no. That surprised her and she ran her fingers through her wet hair, combing it as best as she could while she thought of how to phrase her next question. Finally, she couldn't think of a better way to say it, so she simply said, "Do I know you?"

To her surprise, he smiled, a shadowy quirking of the face muscles that pulled up the corners of his mouth. She wondered if her question was funny to him and waited for a shake or a nod, but neither came. Instead, his eyes remained on her face, the half-smile on his lips.

Something that had been nagging at her since he had appeared finally managed to put itself into coherent thought, and her gaze went to the hand that fell quietly at the child's side against the robes. She squinted, trying to make it out more clearly, then traced the outline of his body with her eyes to make sure she was not seeing things.

There was not enough light for her to make sure, but she thought she could see, ever so faintly, the shape of the rain falling around the very periphery of the boy's body, as if he were edged in soft light, transparent. She got up and went towards him, and he watched her but made no attempt to move out of her way.

When she was standing directly in front of him, looking down at him, she said, "May I touch you?"

Her heart beat once, then twice, loudly in her ears, and then he nodded. She reached out her left hand and slowly touched the place where his head should be. She felt only a sense of resignation as it passed through his body, touching only air.

"I see," she said quietly, and withdrew her hand.

He looked at her with those large child's eyes that held too many secrets for a mere child to have known, and she smiled sadly at him, not knowing why, just feeling like she had to. He turned his head and watched the rain.

"I'm going to change clothes," she told him, just in case she had to warn him, though there was really no point. "The clothes I have on are all wet, and the ones that were in the pack are a little drier." He didn't give any sign he had heard her, which she took as an affirmative that yes, she could do whatever she wanted. Trooping back over to where her worldly possessions were laid out in soggy heaps, she quickly stripped her wet shirt and long skirt off and donned the slightly damp ones that had been folded neatly inside the backpack. Went to wring out her skirt, and then stopped.

The clam shell was still in her pocket when her questing hand reached in for it. She'd almost hoped for a second that it would have fallen out somehow in the rain when she had slipped down the hill, but of course there was no such luck. She would keep it, she had told Soi, and it would remain with her until...

Blue light shone suddenly in the space around her and she looked around to find the child standing there, staring at the shell in her hand.

"Yes?" she asked after a minute when he made no gesture or movement.

He shook his head.

She blinked. "Yes?" she said again.

He looked up at her and shook his head more violently. No, she interpreted the gesture. No what? "You don't want me to have this," she hazarded, and he nodded, again violently. She sighed. "I wish I didn't."

She was startled when he reached out a hand barely after she had said the words, to snatch the shell out of her hand, and she jerked back. He looked surprised, then pensive, then sad as his hand dropped back to his side. Could he have taken the shell out of her hand? Soi seemed not to be able to touch tangible objects except under special circumstances, such as when they were given to her. Yet it hadn't stopped this child from trying.

"I wish I didn't," she said again, firmly, "but it's something I've decided to go through with. I know it's dangerous, and maybe bad things will happen if it's opened. But I can't go through life running away from things anymore. It's unhealthy."

The child seemed to consider her words as his fingers of his free hand opened and closed against his side, then he seemed to come to a decision. Balancing the light carefully in his hand, he made her a low bow, and then knelt. She watched, fascinated, as he scooped a patch of sand together with his sandal, spreading it thick and smooth on the cave floor at her feet, and then began sketching with one finger. It was a character, she saw as he completed the final strokes and then stood back, holding his hand out to it as if to say, see, here is all you need to know.

She knelt down slowly and traced the lines of the character, stroke by stroke, fitting them neatly together in her head like a puzzle.

_Basket._

She stared at the strokes of the character for a very long time, and he held the blue light still, waiting. The rock floor was hard, and when she got painfully to her feet, her kneecaps were aching and her legs felt stiff. They stared at each other again, and then she turned to face him and bowed, the long and low traditional bow that she had been taught to give when someone had paid her a great honor.

The child's lips moved then, and though no sound came, she read the words that were shaped there.

_Yui-sama_, he said, and then he brought the blue light down so that it lay between both of them, illuminating their faces with its cool, clear glow, and as she stood there, feeling strangely weightless, it went out.

She blinked rapidly in the sudden darkness and felt a slight panic rise into her throat as she realized she could not see a thing. She considered calling out to the child, but something told her that he was no longer there; that he had done what he had come to do and had left her now to do what she needed to do in turn. The sharp ridges of the clam were hard in her hand like horn, and very slowly, she lifted it up before her to what felt like eye level.

For a moment, nothing happened. And then, as before, the clam began to glow.

She did not waver as she watched the glow intensify, first to the intensity of a small candle flame, and then to the intensity of the child's light, and then even beyond that, to that of a lantern and then a fire, and then it flared so brightly she had to look away and almost dropped it. The sense of dread that had gripped her once before slithered up and down between her shoulderblades, but she saw it for what it was and paid it no attention. She knew what was inside the shell, now.

She turned back to the shell, shielding her eyes from the worst of the glare, and then she knew she was not alone.

The form was just a silhouette at first, black on white, and she could barely make out the outline of a human shape before her eyes were blinded and then she had to look away again. She tried curling her hand around the shell, but drew her fingers back with a soft hiss when she discovered the clam was hot now, like a brand.

"Well met, Seiryuu no Miko," said the voice of the silhouette, and when she looked back again she saw that it was no longer a silhouette, but in the strangely dimmed light, it was a man, painted face above the elaborate opera costume staring in her with undisguised scorn.

"Hello," she said. "Tomo."

He pointed one long finger at her, and it took all she had to keep from shuddering. "So it was you," he said. "who took my shin. Give it back."

She raised her chin and squared her shoulders, and then she said, "No."

He laughed softly, a laugh like a snake's. "This is not a toy, Seiryuu no Miko." His voice was sensual, darkly and oily seductive, dangerous. "You don't realize what you hold in your hands. Give it back to me."

"Why should I?" she said.

His face darkened and his painted lips thinned in annoyance. "It is wearisome arguing with a child. Don't make me hurt you."

She watched him through the glittering rays of light, wondering what she would do now that she had him here. There was something she needed to do, she had told Soi, to face the past and what it held, and yet now that she was prepared to do so, she had no idea how.

_Don't be idiotic, Yui_, her brain told her, but she squashed that thought firmly. Sometimes life called for the most idiotic things, and this was one of those times.

"I can handle whatever you decide to throw at me," she told him. "Do your worst."

There was the briefest flash of surprise behind those amber eyes, and his mouth curved upward in a sneer. "As you wish," he said. And curled one finger.

The shell clicked open.

The world vanished around her and she had no time to even scream before everything changed. She could not see it, but she could feel it, a feeling like her stomach was curling up on herself and the very atoms of her body were being rearranged, pain so real and acute that she thought she must be dying.

But no, she was lying down, and she could feel silky sheets beneath her hand, the smell of musk and...flowers? Were those flowers? Her eyes were shut, she realized, and she lay still for a moment listening to the world whisper around her, knowing that there was something that had happened, but she could not remember what.

When everything went still, she opened her eyes.

She was lying in a bed. It was a large bed, with a canopy, she saw as she looked upwards. The room she was in was relatively good-sized as well, and the smell of flowers came from the open window, and the musk was some sort of candle that was burning on the table at the side of the bed. She struggled to sit up, feeling that something was terribly wrong. What was it? Where was she? Where was Miaka?

The thought of the name hit her with a terrible intensity, and she pushed herself up on one elbow. "Miaka?" she called frantically. "Miaka?"

There was the rustle of fabric and she followed the sound to its source, sure she would see her friend sitting there at her bedside, to tell her what had happened and how they would get home.

A pair of blue eyes stared piercingly at her, and his smooth voice said, "At last you have awakened."

Nakago, her mind said, and she reeled at the implausibility that she should know the name of this blue-eyed stranger that sat there, because she had never seen him before. "Who are you?" she whispered. Her lips were dry.

"Just a friend." He leaned forward, a small smile playing around his lips, and when he grasped one of her hands, she did not struggle. "I have been watching over you since you were rescued."

"Rescued?"

The blue eyes watched her. "You don't remember?"

She stared at him, uncomprehending, and then something sparked within her memory, an image of the library, a hallway, a book...the pages were open, she saw in horror, and there was a clap of thunder and a splintering of the world into little pieces as she fell into the book because she was supposed to bring Miaka back, bring her friend back so they could be together again back in the world where they belonged, except something had gone wrong and she had come here to an alleyway full of strange men who stared at her and had smiled their cruel smiles, and then...

She screamed.

Strong hands reached for her, and she slapped them away, crying and screaming and feeling the pain and guilt and fear wash over her again and again. "Miaka," she sobbed. "Miaka, help me...come save me..."

"I saved you from those men," a quiet voice whispered into her ear. "Don't worry. They hurt you, but here you won't be hurt any longer. I am here with you."

She shuddered one last time against his big hands and then went limp as his arms came around her head to support her. "Miaka," she whispered brokenly.

"My name is Nakago," he said, "and I am here to serve you, my miko."

She did not look at him again, instead staring at the inside of her eyelids in despair until he lowered her gently back down on the bed and then rose from his chair. She heard the click of his boots against the floor, the squeak of a door as it opened and then snapped softly shut.

Miaka wasn't here after all. Miaka had gone back to Tokyo, to their world, and she had left Yui here, left her, abandoned her...

Fear seized her and she sat bolt upright, clutching at the sheets. But there was only the breeze and the faint smell of flowers in the room. The chair in which Nakago had sat was empty. The musk candle still burned, and she suddenly could not bear the smell of it, leaned over and snuffed it out.

Yes, Miaka had left her here, but the mere thought of that brought with it a feeling of unbalance, as if there was something she did not know, something that had been left out of the telling. She looked around the room again, feeling a weird sense of déjà vu, and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "Wake up, Yui," she told herself. "Wake up!"

But the room did not change, and the bed felt as real as it did before. Frustrated, she swung her legs out from under the covers, shivering in the cool air of the room and the slick, icy texture of the marble floor under bare feet. She did not quite know what she was going to do until she found herself at the door, her hand on the latch, and when it clicked open, she had already made up her mind.

The hallway outside was very quiet and dark, and she slipped out and closed the door behind her so that anyone who passed this way would be none the wiser. Glancing down the corridor again, she took a deep breath and began to walk. This hallway was full of doors, one door after another, all ornately carved and all closed. The thought struck her that she would not be able to remember which door was hers, but that did not matter now. She would not be going back to that room again.

The hallway split off into three passages at its end, and she debated for a moment. They all looked the same to her: eerie, barely lit, slightly drafty. As she stood there, she saw out of the corner of her eye a movement down the hall to her right, almost like the pinpoints of light left behind after a lit sparkler. It was gone when she turned to look, but she could feel the residue there of something that had passed this way not too long ago, something or someone very familiar. That, she decided, was the way.

There were fewer doors down this particular hall, but what struck her were the pictures on the wall, hung at regular intervals and shining in the gloom with almost unearthly light. Most of them seemed to be landscape paintings of mountains or forests or lakes, or faded portraits of beautiful maidens in court gowns standing amidst equally faded flower gardens. A few of them she thought had the faintest traces of writing on them, but when she stopped and leaned in, she found she could not make out any of the characters.

She could see the end of the corridor, past another door and another few pictures, when she felt a strange sensation at the back of her neck, and stopped.

The painting to her left was faded, ancient, just like the rest, but unlike the others there were no mountains or lakes or beautiful maidens. At first she thought it was a stylized river, a ribbon of blue curving like into the corners of the frame and spilling over in a surprising burst of color. But no, the river was uneven, with bumps and ridges and what looked to be scales, and if she followed the lines up just so, it looked like claws...

It was no river after all. It was a dragon.

The dragon's maw yawned open wide at the far edge of the picture and she stared into its beady eyes, so watchful and proud and sinister at the same time. The feeling of something unfinished intensified. What are you doing here? the creature seemed to say, and as she followed the line of its body again, she became aware that she was standing next to a door, and the door was slightly ajar.

She opened the door and went in.

He was standing at the window, and when she closed the door with a soft click, he did not turn around. The black hair flowing out from the golden headdress cascaded down his back like a mahogany-black waterfall, contrasting vividly with the vibrant red of his cloak, and he was holding something in his hand. She did not need to move closer to know that it was a clam shell, glowing slightly blue.

"Seiryuu no miko," he greeted her, and she shook her head.

"What are you doing here, Tomo?"

"I could ask you the same thing," he responded with a sneer, "but it would be such a waste of my time."

"I'm not here to argue with you, Tomo," she said. "I'm just a wanderer like you, trying to find my own way home."

His shoulders stiffened, as if she had insulted him with the audacity to compare herself to him. "And what," he said, "would you know about that?"

The world seemed to tilt at his words, and she closed her eyes until it righted itself. When she opened them, he had turned around to face her, arms crossed over his chest and golden eyes narrowed in faint superiority. She took a step toward him and then stopped, feeling the air thicken as soon as her foot moved, as if there was an invisible wall around him that would destroy her if she moved too close.

"Kaika," she said. The name was awkward on her tongue. "You tried to...hurt him. Why?"

Tomo cackled softly, but even as the chill of unease rippled through her, she had the feeling that all this was very familiar to her and she was simply trapped in a maze, searching desperately for the exit. "The answer is the same as it is with you," he intoned smoothly. "You have taken something that is mine, and I demand it back. That is all. Give me back what is mine, and I will be gone from your life forever."

"And what will you do, when I give it back to you?"

His eyes narrowed. "That is none of your concern."

She shook her head. "Why not? I am, after all, the Seiryuu no Miko." Miko, her mind whispered to her, miko. That was what she was, her title, something that she had come into this world to become...no, that was not right. Miaka was the miko, she thought hazily. Miaka, not her. Except Miaka had abandoned her and so she had become the miko, in order to...

"Your job is finished," Tomo snapped. "You are released from your duties, free to leave. You are no longer the miko!"

"Then why do you address me as such?"

He stared at her in undisguised anger, and she curled her fist at her side. "I'm not here to argue," she said again. "But you must admit it's a bit strange, isn't it? If I'm not the miko anymore, if my job is finished, then why am I still here? Why do you still call me by that title? Why am I haunted by specters of you and all the others who have died and should be gone too? Why didn't Nakago just kill me?"

She saw him shudder at her words though she could tell he was trying very hard not to. "I am not Seiryuu," he bit out, "that I can answer such questions. Maybe something went wrong! I'm not your god, Yui-sama."

The title was mocking, but she let the acid in his tone slide off her neatly, ignoring it. "Just tell me, Tomo. If I give you back your shin, what do you intend to do with it?"

His throat worked and she saw a nerve in his jaw twitch, and an image rose before her eyes of a vision, of a man with a cascade of black hair and such pain and anger emanating from his presence that it almost hurt to look at him. "Yes, Tomo," she said softly. "Something did go wrong. You know that as well as I do."

She took a step toward him and felt the same constricting air around her feet. The wall again. She struggled to stand up straight under the weight of the air that seemed to grow heavier around her the longer she stood there. She was close enough now to see that the clam shell he held in his hand was flickering, almost transparent, a dream-image of the real thing. One more step.

"Get away from me," Tomo rasped, holding out one hand as if he could ward her off by the very force of his presence, and she swayed, but did not fall. The painted face stood out starkly under the headdress of black and gold, every line of vivid color etched into her vision like the bold strokes of characters drawing themselves over and over again.

"There's no need to do this. I can't even touch you," she whispered. "You're dead."

"Then remove yourself from my presence!" he spat, bring up both hands now in an arc of blue fire. "Step back from me, or I'm warning you, you will be hurt."

She raised her head and stared straight into his eyes, and as the fury and resentment and darkness and pain poured down upon her like rain, she clenched her teeth and said, "No."

As she took the final step toward him and reached out her hands, Tomo's form shivered and then dissolved before her, a white-hot mirage exploding outward and stinging her face, her hands, her exposed legs and feet with burning fragments. She cried out and tried to turn her head away, but the fragments were melting, running down her body until it seemed like she was melting also. The space around her was a giant furnace, and through it she could feel such a horrible sense of despair that she wanted to die.

Nakago-sama, she heard herself say, I will always be the only one by your side.

The memory was a droplet of fire trickling through her mouth, open in a silent scream, running down her tongue to the back of her throat.

_We are two souls lost in the darkness. I thought we would understand each other._

The fire lapping around her was like water now, bubbling up like volcano lava. She wanted to open her eyes but she could not, plunging deeper and deeper into the blackness that surrounded her, but wait, there were arms holding her, babbling voices piercing into her memory and then a name, she thought, a name repeated over and over, running endlessly into the darkness. Ryo Chuin, the memory said, and then began to laugh madly. Ryo Chuin. Ryo Chuin.

_I thought we would understand each other._

She saw Miaka's face then, her friend's eyes and mouth open in terror, and the clam shell in her hand was heavy as lead as she leaned over and looked into it and saw the skyscrapers and highways and heavy skies of Tokyo, the feeling of a horrific power thrumming through her as if on tightly wound springs, knowing that she had to have the girl who was kneeling before her, had to destroy her because if she didn't, Kutou would fail and Nakago...Nakago would...

_Nakago-sama_, she tried to say, but the words could not take shape because there was someone there blocking the light. The clam shivered in her hands, and then Tokyo splintered into a million pieces, bursting with a sickening crack as a voice cried out.

"Get away from my brother!"

There were faces in front of her, one face, then two, then one again, resolving itself into two faces sliding back and forth in front of, behind each other until she was dizzy with the movement, a familiar face, a face that she had known and had trusted, and suddenly she realized the face was Kaika's, except that it was not an illusion and that there really were two of them, two boys, clothes dirty and torn and bloody, eyes burning with an emotion she had never known. Nakago hadn't told her this would happen. Nakago had said he would have the world in the palm of his hand. Nakago had said he would not fail, and she had believed him, but Nakago had been wrong.

_Nakago-sama, you lied to me._

She was falling.

The very air was raining down upon her and she did not want to open her eyes and see the destruction of the world around her, but something tugged at the corner of her mind through the numbing pain. Open your eyes, it told her urgently. Open them, or it will be too late!

The brilliant light seared her vision and she almost could not bear to keep them open, tried to turn away but could not, because there was something falling toward her. A man, she thought, wearing some sort of cape, a ragged cape fluttering in the breeze. Spears of light stabbed at her eyes and she reached up toward her face, wrenching her eyelids open with her fingers and realizing at the same time that the blackness fluttering around the man was not a cape, but instead it was a curtain of unbound black hair.

"Tomo," she breathed and reached out her arms for him as he came plummeting down toward her, blood staining his chest and spurting outward as he landed heavily in her arms, arms and legs and head limp like a doll's. She cried out as the weight of him seemed to twist something deep inside. Her heart, perhaps, she thought, and pressed her head against the cavernous wound in his chest where she could see splinters of bone and the shiny, dark muscles of his heart pumping feebly. She tasted his blood in her mouth, trickling in as she struggled to balance his body against her, and she saw in an instant Tomo's world laid bare. He was not here to seek revenge on her for doing what she had been called to do, nor was he here for revenge against the ones who had killed him, nor penance for the wrong he had done.

The only thing Tomo wanted was an answer from the man for whom he had died.

The wind whipped at both of them and she felt him slipping from her grip, tightened her arms more firmly around him and let the gale carry them as the white-hot light slowly dimmed and they were falling now ever more slowly. The gusts of air buoyed them like a leaf, and she looked down at Tomo's face as they drifted gently downward. His eyes were tightly closed, his mouth bared in a grimace of terror and pain, and she closed his eyes against the wound in his chest, which was still wet and sticky against her cheek.

"I can't give you back your shin yet," she told him, knowing that he could not hear her but not caring. "The thing that you have left to do can't be completed until I've done my part, not until Soi and Kaika and the rest have come to terms with what they have to do. I will see Nakago again, and when I do, I will make sure you all have the ending that you deserve, whatever that may be." The sound of his heart was very weak now, and she pressed one hand over it, as if the act could stop the flow of lifeblood gushing from his chest. "I wish I could promise more. I wish I could remember more. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry..."

And then as the wind picked them up and they rose slowly upward through spears of light, like the rising sun, she felt his hand twitch against hers. She raised her head from his chest and barely dared to hope as the muscles of his face worked and his eyes opened ever so slowly, and he said, "Yui-sama?"

"I-" she began, but the wind was howling in her ears now, and as she reached out a hand to him, she lost her grip and then there was nothing but shrieking torrents of air about her and a voice that seemed to be both inside her mind and out, whispering _Nakago-sama. Nakago-sama. Nakago-sama_.

_No,_ she wanted to say. _I can't have it end like this!_

But there was something beating at her closed eyelids, and she reluctantly gave in, struggled upward and forward into wakefulness, eyes snapping open with a start. She was curled up on the floor of the cave, she realized, and it was only the next morning, and her clothes and belongings were still scattered over the ground, and every muscle in her body hurt but it was light outside now, and it had stopped raining.


	10. Part Ten: Kaika

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Ten: Kaika**

He rolled to one side as the shadow leaped, and as it soared over his head he felt the shock like a ripple in the very fabric of the air, curling outward when the thing rammed headlong into the rider atop the frantic steed. The war leader grunted and then toppled from his horse, the sword falling from limp hands, and crashed into a heap on the rock floor and lay very still. Impossible, he thought, and then saw the thin trickle of red running outward through the cracks of the dusty ground from where the big man lay sprawled.

For a second, everything was quiet.

And then the giant shadowy shapes launched themselves out of the fog, tearing at the throats of horses and of men, seemingly oblivious to the desperate sword-strokes whistling around their heads. When he dared to raise his head to look, all he saw were the terrified whites of horse-eyes and the thud of bodies crashing to the ground, a thin hissing sound and then something wet settling onto his face like a fine mist. It was not till he raised one hand to wipe it away that he realized it was blood.

It was time for him to go. He could make a run for it before the men had a chance to regroup, and it was now or never. He scrabbled blindly around him for his flute, his hand closing on the tube of bamboo, and as he rolled out, preparing to get up, he turned his head and saw a pair of luminous yellow eyes staring him in the face.

He thought a sound like a small squeak emitted from his throat, but he was not sure. All that ran through his mind was that his luck had run out and neither Seiryuu nor Byakko could protect him from this. He would die here, alone in a cave, without ever seeing Yui again.

The wolf standing before him was enormous, almost the length of a full-grown horse, gigantically hairy, fur matted and bristling, snarling and salivating and clearly very angry. He cringed, prepared for those gleaming jaws to snatch him up and make quick work of him just as it had the warband leader, but the wolf did not move.

He barely dared to blink. It would not be prudent to try and tuck his flute back in his belt, he thought, as any unexpected move would result in his being torn to shreds. He tried to swallow, tried to say something, but his voice stuck in his throat.

The wolf made a low growling noise and clicked its jaws. Once. Twice. The bushy tail swished against the cave floor, and as another sword clattered to the ground beside them and the din of combat at the mouth of the cave heightened, the animal bent its forelegs and lowered its head to the ground in a grand sweeping motion.

It was almost like a bow, he thought dazedly, a human bow. He waited for the wolf to raise its head, but it did not. Instead, great yellow eyes fixed on his from where the animal's head lay low to the floor, and it seemed to be waiting. Kaika reached behind him to steady himself against the rock wall, and rose to a crouch. The wolf lay motionless.

There was a growl from just beyond his right shoulder, and he saw two shadows fly over his head, and then the stumbling form of a man came into his line of vision, arms windmilling, face white with terror, hands outstretched straight towards him.

If he had time to think, he would probably have been lucid enough to move out of the way, or at least distract the man with a well-aimed kick to the head or chest. But there was no time, and he was too frightened to think, and so he did the only thing he could. Ramming his flute against his mouth, he began to play.

The man stopped in midmotion, white face turning ashen, and then his hands went to his head and he began to scream. The melody coming from the flute buzzed in his own ears and he felt a sensation rising up inside of him like ghosts out of a fog, melding with the shrill notes. The cave narrowed to a pinpoint. It was just him and the flute and the man who he held captive in his power, the power of his music, the power that welled up inside him and the blue light from his right arm-

And then the man fell to the cave floor, gave one last convulsive twitch, and did not move again.

The flute dropped from his nerveless fingers and his raised his hands up to his face, thinking, what have I done?

"Devil!" cried the voices from behind him in terror. "Demon!" He heard the pounding of footsteps, the snarling and thuds of animals launching themselves at human armor, but the footsteps were coming close now, and he had nowhere to run.

He looked wildly around him in a panic, and the yellow eyes were still there, the wolf's entire body tensing like a wound coil. Come with me, it seemed to say as its gaze met his. I can save you.

He hesitated for a split second, and then he made his choice.

The wolf's back, sinewy and powerfully uneven underneath his hands and between his legs, paused for half a heartbeat, and he felt that they were standing on the edge of some precipice, gazing out at the world, frozen like a beautiful statue. And then the animal gathered itself under him and he grabbed at handfuls of its fur, clamping his legs onto the sides of the hard belly, and closed his eyes as it leaped clear over the heads of their assailants and outside into the open air.

For a glorious frozen moment of time they were suspended in mid-flight, like birds, he thought wildly, as the rays of the rising sun beat down upon his shoulders. Then his stomach did a little flip and he felt the its contents churn in an unpleasant manner before the shock of the landing hit him, and he almost lost his grip on the wolf's back and fell off.

The animal did not stop, hit the ground at a dead run, and he gasped for breath as he hauled himself up and wound his arms under the wolf's neck, squinting his eyes and finding it hard not to shriek as trees and brush rushed past them at impossible speeds. Air whistled around him, stinging his face with the sheer speed of it, and when he opened his mouth to draw a deep breath he almost choked. The rhythm of the animal's paws thudded in his ears like war drums.

Something crashed down to the ground next to them, and as the wolf swerved, already leaving it behind almost before it had landed, he saw it was a spear. They were tracking him, he realized dazedly. They were following him. He could hear faint cries coming from some distance away, but they were men's voices. If only he had his flute, he thought, but it was too late for that now. His flute was lost.

His mount swerved again and he clung to his tenacious perch as the wolf seemed to leap at random, every time managing to spring out of the way just as a spear or arrow landed in the spot where they had just been. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut and let the looming veil of fright settled over him, but no, that was something he would not do. He could not do that. The wolf trusted him, had seen something in him that was worth saving, and he would not repay that by being a coward.

"Faster!" he cried, and the animal seemed to quiver from the tip of its nose all the way to its tail, and it obeyed.

He could no longer see, could only feel the ground rushing under them at a tremendous rate and the world flashing by them in a roar. Everything was white, and red, and blue like the sea. This was what it was like to drown, he thought, to fall into roaring river rapids and never to see the daylight again. He felt his head hit the water, and as it did so, he saw something else too, faces rising above the handrail of a stone bridge, voices calling for him, and then a girl, dressed all in white and red, reaching out her hand-

Then space and time gave one enormous revolution around him, and ground to a halt. He gasped, startled to find tears of pain streaming from the corners of his eyes where the wind had whipped them, and the earth seemed to tilt beneath him as he found his balance. He was gripping something - handfuls of it, and the thing between his legs was not a horse, the proportions were wrong, too low to the ground...

A spasm ran through him, and then he realized he was seated on the back of the wolf still, but they were no longer running, that the wolf had stopped.

For a moment, he thought that the animal had betrayed him. The soldiers were still coming, he knew frantically, and any moment now they would burst through the trees and find them standing there. He did not want to die like this. Then he saw that the wolf was standing very still, one front leg slightly bent, tongue hanging dripping from the heavy jaws as its flanks heaved under his thighs, and the muzzle was pointed forward, the eyes fixed on something. He followed the animal's line of sight, up from the edge of the lightly grassed tree-hung clearing where they stood to the foot of the small hill directly ahead.

There was only the sun, he thought for a moment. It dappled in his eyes and he had to blink again, ridding his lashes of the last of the wind-blown tears, and then he realized that it was not just the glare of sunlight, but there was something standing there at the far side of the glen. He blinked again, trying to focus, and it moved.

The white wolf before them was easily twice as big as the one he sat astride, four legs planted on the ground like the solid trunks of trees, layers of hard muscle rippling under shimmering fur, a show of strength barely held in check. The huge jaws were parted slightly, and triangular ears pricked, as if testing the wind. This was power, the creature standing there so poised and elegant, glowing in the sunlight as if carved simply out of the air. He wondered if he was dreaming.

Then it blinked, giving a shake of its head, and he watched the white fur ripple like a living sea of flowers as it pawed at the ground with one foreleg as a stallion would. It blinked again, and then he started, jolted out of the vision of perfection he had imagined this animal to be. Where the wolf's left eye should have been was instead an ugly, jagged red scar.

He would have slipped from his wolf's back if he had had the time, would have been drawn slowly across that field to come face to face with the animal whose scar across its eye was the same as the scars across his own heart. But even as he prepared to dismount, something whistled past his ear. Instinct took over and flattened him against the wolf's back as it growled and twisted aside, leaping sideways to land perfectly on all four feet low and snarling against the ground.

But his first thought was not for himself, but instead for the white wolf as the arrows zinged past his ear again. "Stop! Go back!" he shouted as the wolf leaped across the grass like the wind, but they could not stop, and even as he tried to jerk his mount around by great handfuls of fur, the white wolf was soaring towards them in a single bound. They would collide, he knew, and he opened his mouth to call out a warning.

There was simply the shiver of something cold and slightly frosty, like the feeling of the first snow of the year in the air, and then the wolf passed through him like the wind and was gone.

He thought of Soi, her ghostly form walking before him in the rainstorm, of Tomo emerging from the clam shell as insubstantial as one of his illusions, and then he cried, "Ashitare!"

The white wolf came leaping back toward him then, and as it vanished into the trees, he saw three arrows and a spear pass through it as though it was simply not there. The cries of men echoed in his ears, and then the thunder of hooves. Horses, he thought. They were gaining. The wolf under him settled into a steady running pace, neither pulling ahead nor holding back, and it was as if it were waiting for something. The thought of urging it on to go faster did not feel right, so he gripped the fur tightly to keep his balance and let the animal set its own pace.

It began as a shadow at the edge of his vision. At first he thought he was seeing things, gray flickers that darted in and out and never materialized into anything solid, so he kept his eyes on the space between the wolf's ears and wondered where the road was leading. The drumming of hoofbeats did not slacken behind him, and he heard the shouts of men urging their mounts on. The horses had to be tiring, but they didn't seem to be showing any signs of slowing, and he knew that riders in the Kutou cavalry were trained to make their horses run till they collapsed. He had no doubt this was what would happen here. It was no longer a battle of seishi and soldier, but wolf against horse.

The gray flickers swarmed around the corners of his field of vision now, growing and twisting until they was like strands of non-color through the green and brown of the forest through which they passed at a steady gallop. He heard the hoofbeats coming, heard the panting of horsebreath closing in, and then he heard the very distinctive sound of a horse's terrified scream and looked back.

The gray shadows were wolves. They flowed around the trees, through the grass, in silent, ghostly formation like waves across the sea. Running low and tight, nose to nose and tail to tail in undulating lines, the sunlight glimmering through the leaves in the deep forest through which they loped filled the air with a soft blue-gray sheen. He did not know if the horses had recovered, if the Kutou riders were still coming despite the army of wolves, but it did not matter now. The trees ended just ahead, and as they burst through the wood into another vast clearing, he saw someone standing in the middle of the glen.

"Soi?" he called breathlessly, hoping that this was their destination. But the wolves did not slow, and he saw them sweep down upon her like a giant wave bearing down onto the shore. "Soi! Over here!" he shouted, wanting to tell her to somehow grab hold of one of the wolves. Then he remembered that was impossible, and the look on her face told him that not even she could outrun a pack of horses.

They could not capture her, of course, but where could she go?

There was a snarl and a whisper of air from across the grassy field, and he saw the white wolf flying through the air from the trees on the far side. It twisted peculiarly in mid-leap, as if trying to orient itself to the woman standing below. Soi saw it too, and she broke into a run as the wolf came streaking toward her.

It was a curious dance of wolf and human, and his eyes were not quick enough to follow as the wolf came bounding in like lightning and the woman reached out her hands, caught it around the neck. The white paws grasped at air and the wolf reared like a horse with the woman clinging to its back, its single yellow eye glowing fiercely. And then as the great white tail caught the ground in a powerful stroke, he felt the wolves around him and the one under him gather themselves as one, and the white wolf said, _Now, we run._

They ran.

It was a curiously weightless sensation, and again he felt as if he were drowning. The last glimpse of the brown-haired girl dressed in gossamer red and white felt very sad, somehow. Chiriko, she called to him. A name? A plea? He didn't quite remember why she had been there. He had always imagined himself falling into the river alone and unmourned, as the rapids carried him away and he was pulled under to a watery grave.

The wind flowed past him like the river current and the wolf's body under him was the beating of his own heart in his chest, the only sound he could hear through the silently endless water of the great river. Time was running by too, days and nights that he could not remember, time in which he should have breathed in too much water or been too long without air to have survived.

But no, a woman's voice spoke low and soft in his ears, and he felt hands pulling at him, hauling him up and out, to a place where it was dry and very cold. "Kaika," the woman said. "Can you hear me?"

"Shun?" he questioned anxiously, and he heard his brother answer, "Yes, aniki?"

The world turned upside down and he was slipping, his arms and legs striking something soft and then his whole body landed with an oomph, as he opened his eyes and realized he was staring at the dripping underbelly of a wolf.

"Amiboshi, are you hurt?"

He winced as he scooted out from where the wolf's sweat was dripping from its fur into his eyes and saw Soi bending over him. "I've been better," he said, "but I'm not injured. Though I lost my flute." And my pack, he thought belatedly, but the flute was more important.

She glanced over him critically, as if to make sure he was not lying just to make her feel better, and then he saw her gaze flit to the space around him. He struggled to a sitting position and saw that they had stopped at the base of a giant tree trunk, ancient and gnarled and rising into the sky as far as he could see through the enormous leafy canopy that covered them. There were wolves everywhere. They stood, sat, paced back and forth as if standing sentry, glancing unconcernedly at him with those unblinking yellow eyes. Curiously, he was not frightened.

"We need to look for Yui," he said finally, and Soi nodded.

"I've managed to locate her, and she's not far. We did pass her location while we were...running, so we'll have to backtrack." She looked uncertain. "Honestly, I was worried back there when the men came into the cave that you weren't going to make it."

"I killed one of them," he admitted. "That was when I lost my flute."

She almost smiled. He could see the crinkle in her eyes but not her mouth. "It was my fault," she said. "If I'd been paying closer attention instead of trying to find Yui while you were still lying there sleeping, I would have spotted those men."

"And then what?" he challenged. She raised one eyebrow. "Would you have taken me somewhere to escape? Those men knew I was there, and merely changing position wasn't going to stop them. They could feel me somehow, I think." It had to be Nakago, he added silently, but he wasn't going to tell her what she already knew. No need to make the wound any deeper than it already was.

"You're right," she replied quietly, "we couldn't have outrun them or escaped them. But that doesn't make me feel any better still. I came back to protect you, and I almost got you killed."

He smiled. "No," he said, shaking his head. "You didn't come back to protect me. You came back to protect Yui. I simply got lumped into the bargain somehow when I started tagging along." She did smile at that, and he smiled back at her wanly. "We're in this together, right? A team, all of us to protect Yui-sama until the end." He emphasized the title, and saw the understanding in Soi's eyes.

"Yes," she replied. "We are." He saw her look past him and turned his head, already knowing he would see the white wolf standing there. "Until the end, whatever that may be."

The wolf was just as majestic at close proximity than it was from far away. There was no sunlight dazzling off its fur coat now, but it moved with ease through the sea of other wolves towards them, and they parted for it, though there was no need to. When it had come close enough to touch, it stopped and lifted its head a bit. He saw the curious mix and match of legendary perfection and scarred eye, but even that seemed somehow right.

"You saved my life," he said to it gravely. "Thank you."

The yellow eye swiveled to Soi, then to him, and then back to the woman. Without knowing exactly why, he held out one hand at the level of the wolf's muzzle, and the eye came back to him, and then it very slowly and carefully laid its nose into his palm. He felt a delicious shiver pass through him at the faint cool sensation in his hand, as if the wind had changed and had brought with it a heady scent of flowers.

"We should go," Soi said from behind him, "before Yui decides that we've abandoned her and starts off on her own."

That would be bad, his mind agreed, and reluctantly he wrenched his hand away, saw the big white animal sit down slowly on its haunches with the grace of a cat, and continue to watch. "How long will it take for us to reach her?"

"It depends," Soi said cryptically. He frowned at her.

"Depends on what?"

She gestured around her, and he realized that the wolves had stopped what they were doing and were instead all standing, heads facing in towards him and eyes fixed on him unblinking. He looked back, startled, at the white wolf, but it too sat very still, head cocked a little bit. It looked almost amused.

"After noon if we walk," Soi said. "But..."

He did not need to ask her to finish the sentence. As he took a deep breath and nodded, the sea of gray bodies parted, and the wolf that emerged in front of him felt like an old friend as he grasped the handful of fur at the nape of its neck and swung himself up onto the broad back.

"We ride," he said.


	11. Part Eleven: Yui

ï»¿ _Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Eleven: Yui**

Through the haze of awakening, she thought she half-heard voices and scrambled to her feet, rushing to the cave entrance to peer through the rapidly brightening morning mist. "Kaika!" she called. "Soi! Kaika!"

But no one answered and nothing moved. She stood there shivering, deciding that the voices had been a product of her half-awake imagination, glancing around with a sigh and a little surprised to see that the cave opened out to a wide, flat valley surrounded by mountains. The fog was still too thick to make out much, but she could hear the sound of rushing water, a river most likely, engorged by last night's flooding.

Kaika and Soi could be minutes away, or hours. The thought sank her spirits, and she shuffled back inside, staring at her possessions laid out in a neat crescent around where she had slept. Her back ached, as if she had fallen asleep in an odd, twisted position, and she raised one hand to her head, feeling the beginnings of a bump there. Had she hit her head?

She knelt to fold the blouse and skirt that lay crumpled at the outer edge of the half-circle, and the clam shell winked at her in the morning light.

Clam shell.

The shirt fell from her hands and the events of last night's vivid dream flooded into her mind. But no, it had not been a dream. The ghost child had left her there in the dark to willingly embrace what had lain inside that shell, and that had been nothing but her own memories, memories that she had forgotten. There had been the room where she had lain unconscious, the chair in which Nakago had sat and watched over her as she cried for Miaka, the hallways of the Kutou palace, the blue dragon.

Tomo.

She sat down hard on the rock floor, head in her hands, and stared at the small white shell, so deceptively innocent and harmless. She was tempted to touch it again, to tempt fate and see if Tomo would still answer the summons, but something told her not to, a small voice whispering to her that she had seen through all the illusions Tomo had to offer, and in doing so had defeated him at his ultimate game.

Seiryuu no Miko, he had called her.

She shook her head hard and finished folding the shirt, then folded the skirt and stuffed both into her pack, laid the cloak neatly on the ground beside it. The water canteen was still nearly full, so she did not need to worry about that. As she began to pack the remainder of the fruit, her stomach growled and told her that she had not eaten in almost an entire day, so she plucked the ripest of the apples from the pile and devoured it.

Then she slung the pack over her shoulders and stood up.

The mist had mostly burned away, and she saw there was indeed a river running through the center of the valley, its banks wide and steep and gently sloping, lined with small trees. She glanced around the cave again, silently thanking it for sheltering her during the night, and then stared hard at the white shell at her feet. It was with reluctant fingers that she bent down and picked it up to place it back into her pocket, but even as she left the cave and headed out into the moist, muddy patches of ground leading down to the riverbank, she knew she could not have left the place without taking it with her.

She did not intend to go far. Soi would eventually find her, she told herself, and so all that was necessary was that she be patient and wait. She could have waited in the cave, but the events of last night seemed a little too vivid within its walls, like some sort of waking nightmare. Here in the sunlight and the foaming river rapids, the world seemed somewhat brighter.

Finding a broad, flat rock overlooking the sandy banks, she sat down with a sigh and pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and staring down into the water. The image of Tomo falling toward her, all black hair and red blood, still lingered before her eyes and no matter how hard she stared into the glittering sunlit river water, she could not rid herself of it. Why had he stood there and let her come towards him? she wondered. Surely someone with power of his caliber could have simply disappeared.

But yet Tomo had stood there and waited.

She jumped to her feet and made a long, slow circle around the rock, hands in her pockets but not letting her fingers brush the clam shell there. A flock of birds came into view, wheeling lazily through the sky that was now almost blindingly blue. Like the light from the character on Kaika's arm, she thought, and then jerked her hands out of her pockets as if she had just broken some kind of taboo by simply thinking of it.

She would not think of Kaika. She could not. Even if fate was kind and there would be some kind of future for the two of them, it was not fair to him, because she didn't belong here. In the end, she would return to Tokyo or she would be killed here, and either way, he would be left behind.

She suddenly wondered if Suboshi had understood that.

The mud around the stone was still very wet, and her shoes made squashing noises as they sank into the thick, loamy earth. She lost track of how many times she had already gone around the rock, only that there were many tracks of footprints in the mud now, and the sun rose higher in the sky, and Soi did not come.

The Kutou palace most likely lay somewhere east of the river, she decided, calling to mind her rudimentary tracking skills that she had learned at some point and time, most likely from Nakago, though she could not remember him teaching her anything about direction-finding. She wondered what he was doing now, if he was striding through the corridors of the palace as she remembered him, emperor's robes flying behind him instead of the blue cape of the shogun. Perhaps he was already drawing up maps for a new campaign. She thought of his face and tried to hate him, but instead she just felt very sad.

_Nakago-sama, you lied to me._

She stopped in her tracks and retreated back to her rock, crossing her legs under her as she stared out at the river again, but thinking of the shell in her pocket. The least Tomo deserved was an apology, if not an explanation. She had invaded his domain without asking, had defied him in his requests, and then had forced herself into his memories. Feeling faintly ashamed of herself, she rubbed one hand along the top of her forehead at the sweat beginning to bead there, and then abruptly reached for the shell.

It did not glow this time. Maybe she just didn't see it in the brighter light of the sun, or maybe its power had been spent in the encounter last night. She held it for a long time, willing it to open, to speak, to do something, but it simply sat there in her hand and continued to be just a plain, common clam shell. It would, she thought as she muttered to herself under her breath and glared at it.

"Answer me, Tomo," she said through gritted teeth, and then the shell shuddered in her hand and fell open.

Startled, she jumped and almost dropped it. But nothing appeared from the shell's depths, no images or mirages or anything of the sort to suggest it was anything other than an ordinary shell washed up on the shore. She waited a moment more, then was about to lay it carefully on the rock face and go back to watching the river when she felt someone behind her.

When she turned around, he was standing there where she thought he would be, the resplendence of his costume almost hidden by the shadows of the trees clustered in thick groves along the ridge. He did not move as she slipped off the rock and took a step in his direction. She was half-fearful that she would feel the invisible wall of air again, but nothing stopped her, and he simply watched her walk towards him, expressionless beneath the mask of paint.

She stopped close enough to touch him, but did not do so. It would be a useless effort, and even if she had not already known that, the long black hair and tail feathers of his headdress that did not stir in the brisk morning breeze would have alerted her. They stood in silence for an instant, before he said, "What do you want?"

"Why didn't you pull me into the shell like you did before?" she asked, and his mouth quirked, whether in amusement or annoyance she couldn't tell.

"And what would that have accomplished?"

"I don't want to be treated any differently," she said quietly, "than I was before. I don't want you to see me any differently. I told you that I'm simply a wanderer trying to find my own way home."

He seemed to study her, and then he said abruptly, "Why did you save me?"

She blinked. "What?"

Tomo didn't respond, the amber eyes boring into her face with brilliant intensity, as if willing her to remember something she had forgotten, and all of a sudden she recalled him again, falling from heaven into her outstretched arms, as she had laid her cheek against the mortal wound in his chest and forbid him to die. At the time, it had seemed absurd for her to do anything else. "I suppose," she said after a moment, "I couldn't have lived with myself if I had let go."

The peacock feathers swirled as he turned abruptly away from her. She let him stare off into the distance, wondering if he was formulating a response or if he simply decided that their conversation was over. Shadows passed lightly overhead, a flock of birds calling to each other in strong voices as they fluttered away toward the east.

"That wasn't your decision," he said finally.

His voice was so flat and expressionless that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. She knew better than to try and second-guess Tomo, who had been an actor all his life and could trick her into believing what he wanted her to believe. There was no wall of air here after all, but his wall of words was just as strong. "I'm not here to judge you," she began, and he shook his head roughly.

"Don't attempt to put words into my mouth, Seiryuu no Miko. You breached my guards once, but don't think you'll be able to do so again. I owe you nothing."

"Then why," she said, "did you come back?"

His hands clenched at his sides, the long painted fingernails digging into his palms. She winced, wondering if it was painful, and waited for him to answer, but he did not.

"I'm going back to see Nakago," she said, and saw him stiffen, knew she was close to the mark. "I'm going back to find some answers that he never gave me. That's the only way I can get home, you see. That's all I want to do, in the end."

"You should never have come here in the first place," he ground out, and she knew he was trying to make her angry, but it simply made her feel very sad. This Tomo in front of her was only a bare framework, a shade of the man he had been, reduced to nothing but an empty shell.

"I wish I hadn't come. But wishes can't change the past."

He whirled toward her then, and she almost took a step back in alarm as the feathers whipped toward her, and then stopped herself as they passed through her and appeared on the other side, intact. He did not seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on her, glittering with a clarity that frightened her, and she shivered.

"There is one person in this world whose wishes can change the past," he said softly, "and that is you."

She shuddered at his words, and it was as if she could feel his hot breath on her face like a dragon's, all blue and gold and white like the heart of a fire. Her heart pounded so loud that she could barely hear herself breathe. There had been something about wishes that had been important. Something about prayers being granted, a light from heaven, thunder splitting the sky. Her forehead burned and she brought up her arms wildly, warding herself off from something that was not there.

_Kaijin._

"Stop," she gasped. "Stop...Tomo...don't..."

The world righted itself and she became aware that she had fallen to her hands and knees in the muddy ground, and that Tomo had stepped back, his face once again blank of all emotion. Slowly, painfully, she picked herself up, brushing the mud off her skirt as best as she could. As she scrubbed the worst of it from the palms of her hands, feeling horribly disoriented and confused, he said, "I am sorry."

She stared at him.

But there was no elaboration forthcoming, obviously, because he turned away from her again, and she went back to picking the mud out of her fingernails with a sigh. They could be at this all day, she thought desperately, and wracked her brain for some way to make the man before her at least respond to her in a reasonable fashion. As she feared, nothing came to mind.

And then he said, "I couldn't leave without finding out if I had died for nothing."

The odd sentence threw her for a moment before she realized he was finally responding to her earlier question of why he had come back. She turned her attention away from her fingernails to glance at his red-robed back, the ornate gold headdress, and when he again met her eyes, she wondered what the face behind the paint had looked like.

"I pledged my life to Nakago and his cause," he continued, a little awkwardly. "That cause included you. Once you called Seiryuu, Nakago promised me, then life as we had known it would change. We would be masters of all we touched. I offered him my loyalty in exchange for the world."

"And what did you get in return?" she said.

Tomo's lip twisted. "In return, I received neither his loyalty nor the world. If I had not died, perhaps I would be laughing now at how foolish I was. I don't want revenge, Seiryuu no Miko. I don't even want an equal share. All I am looking for is proof that I did not die for one man's empty dream."

"I know," she said. "I saw." Her eyes went to his chest, covered now by the red opera robe, though she guessed that if she asked him to remove it, she would see the same bloody wound that had bubbled against her mouth inside his illusion. Perhaps he knew what she was thinking, because his eyes slid away from hers and one of his hands curled slightly.

"We do not all choose to be wanderers, Yui-sama."

"Just Yui is fine," she told him quietly.

He had opened his mouth to say something else, but as she spoke, he closed it and stared thoughtfully upward at the tree canopy. The sun was almost to its zenith point now and she wondered if Soi had been delayed, or maybe something had happened to her and Kaika. They could not have been that far separated by the storm, and Soi had never found it difficult to locate her before this.

"They're late," he observed.

"Who?" she asked pointedly, and he shot her a sardonic glance.

"Don't try to test me, Seiryuu no Miko. I've already told you far more than you need to know."

The invisible wall was going up again, and she said, "I'm sorry. I've asked you to trust me. I should do the same for you."

To her surprise, he began to pace, clasping his hands behind his back and making long strides back and forth from tree trunk to tree trunk. She watched him, taking in the elaborate costume again, the radiance of the colors that dazzled forth from the fabric, the gleam of the golden crown that did not seem to come from the sun, and then realized that just as with Soi, Tomo's edges were faintly ragged, like torn fabric against the solid forest framework that was his backdrop on center stage.

"How many wishes did you make?" he asked abruptly, and she frowned.

"Excuse me?"

"Wishes," he said, impatiently, stopping his pacing and crossing his arms. "Three wishes, Nakago said you would receive. Did you use all of them?"

Her mind muddled its way through his question. Wishes, she thought again, something important about them and Miaka. Wishes. Miaka. Seiryuu. She swallowed and fought the words that threatened to run round and round in a circle until she was dizzy. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I don't remember."

His eyes were hard and flat as he took in her words, and then something seemed to clear in his face. "I see," he said.

She squinted up at the sun so he would not see the tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. "That's partly why I'm going back to Nakago. It's like a book, in my head, but half of the pages are still blank, and the other half..." she tried to laugh. "Well, the other half is mostly there, but it doesn't make sense without the rest."

Tomo was staring at her strangely, and she returned his gaze a little defiantly. "What?" she demanded, and he gave a sort of snort at the back of his throat that was gentler than the almost-ghostly cackle she seemed to remember from a long time ago. "If you're waiting for Nakago to fill in the blanks," he told her, "you're badly mistaken."

She shook her head. "No, that's not it. I think..." Stopping, trying to choose the right words. "I think that maybe if I just go back and see him, hear his voice...something will jog itself loose." She laughed again. "I know that sounds a little farfetched, but it's true."

"Sometimes," he said, not looking at her, "I think the same thing. That seeing his face and hearing his voice will be enough."

She took a step toward him, and then she said, "Come with me."

For the first time she could remember, Tomo looked faintly shocked, and then he stared pointedly at the shell lying behind her on the rock. "Do I have a choice?" he said. The condescending edge was back in his voice.

"Yes," she said. "You do. I can simply just leave the shell here on this rock, and you won't be bothered by me again."

"And then what will I do?" he demanded, and she told him, "That's what you wanted at the beginning, wasn't it? To be left alone?"

He glared at her.

"I won't force you to come with me," she said. "I'm not Nakago."

He folded his arms tighter and continued to glare, but the glare was missing something now, and she could tell he was thinking while trying to give the impression that he was not thinking after all. Was he such a poor actor, she wondered, that he was not able to disguise that? Or maybe he meant her to see. She was still pondering this, waiting for his answer, when he stiffened and then said, "There is someone coming."

"Is it Soi?" she said, already scrambling over to the rock to pull her pack on so that she would be ready, but he shook his head, and a chill of dread ran through her.

In the distance, she could hear the hoof beats of horses.

"Who is it?" she asked him, but as they both turned their heads in the direction of the approaching company, she knew the answer before he said it.

"The Kutou army."

If he expected her to panic or to run, he was mistaken. She simply shrugged her pack on and tightened the straps, and as he gave her an unreadable look, she said, "I'm not about to pass up a direct trip to the Kutou palace. This will save time."

"Soi will be angry," he responded flatly.

"If you do not go with me," she said, "you 'll be free to stay behind and warn her if you like."

She did not wait for a response from him but leaned down to pick up her water skin, and as she did so, the clam shell jittered slightly where it lay on the rock and then swung shut. "Tomo?" she called behind her, but there was no answer. She stared at the shell for a moment more, and then tucked it securely into her pocket. When her hands touched it, it was feverishly warm.

There was nothing else to be done, so she moved out from behind the cover of trees as the first of the mounted patrol appeared at the top of the hill, thundering down the slope into the valley, dust and bits of grass and wildflower flying from under the horses' hooves in a whirlwind of color. The leader gave a shout, wheeled his horse around at the sight of her, and she cringed back a bit as the animal strained at the bit and barely missed her as it turned sharply, slowing to a trot and then a walk. The sword pointed at her throat was very sharp.

"Don't move!" the leader barked, and she bowed her head slightly and kept very still. There were more horses now, coming in toward her in a tight circle. For a moment she felt the old fears rise up and she almost panicked, but that was past, she reminded herself firmly. She would return to the palace, and she would face Nakago, and somehow she would finish the story.

Someone dismounted and came toward her with a coil of rope, and she stood obediently as they bound her hands behind her back and then jerked her towards one of the horses. "If you know what's good for you, you'll keep quiet," her captor said. "The emperor would very much like to have you back alive."


	12. Part Twelve: Kaika

Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Twelve: Kaika**

They reached the spot Soi had indicated shortly after the sun had climbed to its zenith overhead, hanging there in a blazing orb of unrelenting heat so curiously unexpected after yesterday's rainstorm. The wolves had settled into a steady running pace as soon as they had left the grove of trees, but the mix of burning sun and whistling wind was disorienting. Looking forward to the horizon made him dizzy, so he contented himself with wrapping his arms around the wolf's neck, hunching down and feeling the powerful muscles under the fur work with a curious rolling motion, like a ship trolling through rough waters.

The landscape changed slowly as they made their way westward. He had no idea how far they had run to escape the soldiers, but he gradually became aware that the land was regressing from lush forest to rocky dirt basin, always sloping gently upward. The wolves did not seem to notice the change in elevation, did not stop or slow even when the slope became steeper and even a strong horse would have been forced to walk. But the wolves flowed on, like gray waves of water over the land, taking hill after hill and valley after valley, with the sound of hundreds of paws striking the stone as only a soft whisper.

He saw the white wolf swing in as they topped the crest of another hill and began their descent into the valley below, its sides dotted with dwarfish trees and gnarled bushes amid the rock outcroppings. He'd lost sight of Soi once the pack had started running, but he saw her now, seated on the wolf's back and gesturing to him with one arm. There's something wrong, her gesture told him, and he urged his mount forward. The pack fell back around him and the panting of wolf's breath filled his ears as he came abreast of the white wolf and its rider, slowing to something like a trot.

"She's not here," Soi called to him.

"What?" he yelled back, frowning at her and seeing the furrowed expression on her own face. Something was not right. "Where did she go?"

She didn't answer, simply pointed down below to the valley and to the wide river roaring through it, and then the white wolf bounded ahead as the wolfpack thundered down the remaining few lengths to the valley floor and streaked in a wide arc around its edge. The wind sang in his ears, and he thought suddenly of his flute.

When he dismounted, legs unsteady after riding for so long, Soi was already standing at the river's edge looking into the water thoughtfully. Yui, he thought, mind going back automatically to when he'd pulled her out of the river that day in Sairou, but no, she couldn't have drowned. "What happened?" he demanded, gulping deep breaths of air as Soi turned.

"Look around you," she said, and he made a small circle, looking for a sign, a scent, anything. There was the feeling in the air of disquiet, he realized, and there had been a great many people here only a short time ago. He felt the presence of them in the wind around him still as it curled its fingers through the air and tickled the rivergrass that grew tall and green in the shallows of the water.

"Hoofprints," he said suddenly, and bent down to touch the unmistakable shape of a horseshoe in the soft, muddy ground. It was only one of many, he saw, that the area around the river and the bank as far as he could see upward had been trampled by horses. His heart sank.

"What do you think?" Soi asked quietly, and he gritted his teeth.

"It was too easy," he muttered, "to think that Nakago would send only one band of soldiers."

Something flashed behind her eyes at the name, but she only said mildly, "It seems Yui-sama might beat us to the Kutou palace after all."

"This isn't a joke, Soi!"

"And I'm not joking," she returned, her voice hard and set. His eyes went to the white wolf standing watchful beside her, and the wolf regarded him thoughtfully, and then he heard it speak, though it used no words.

_The Kutou palace is a hard day's run east of here._

"They've got a head start of about two or three hours, it seems," Soi mused, bending down to run ghostly fingers along the horseshoe prints in the mud. "Would it be worth it to push your wolves that hard?"

_Do you think it is worth it?_ Ashitare asked, and then followed up swiftly, _I do not know what Nakago has in mind after her capture._

"Are you crazy?" Kaika said in disbelief. "He'll kill her!"

Both of them looked at him, and then Soi said, "No, I don't think so."

He swallowed his anger with a visible effort, turning away from them to meander down to the water's edge. A few reed plants grew in the shallow, marshy areas just off the shore, and his mind went to his flute again, wondered if it was still lying there in that cave in the shadows, waiting for him to go back and reclaim it. That was impossible, he knew, but the unfamiliar lightness of the belt around his waist was disquieting.

"Why else would he want her?" he said, "if not to kill her? She's a threat to his empire, isn't she? Don't tell me Nakago's given up on conquering the rest of the four kingdoms."

"If he was going to kill her," Soi said softly, "he would have done it from the very first."

He thought of Yui's voice saying, He sold me to a slave trader. "That's true," he admitted grudgingly. "But I don't understand why."

"I might have an idea," Soi continued. "But I can't validate it until we see her again, and by that time, it might be too late, and we don't have time to hope that Nakago might be kind."

"Was he ever kind?" he retorted hotly, and the wind changed just then, shifting from the north to the northeast, bringing with it a sweet smell, like the blooming of a hundred fields of flowers.

_Amiboshi. You will go to Konan-koku._

"Yes," Soi said. "He was."

They would set out once the pack had time to water, Soi decided, and he chose a flat rock just above the bank, watching as wolves paraded to and from the river in some kind of bizarre pattern that he could not understand, but seemed to result in everyone having an equal turn for drinking. The ones that passed closest to him on their return path would stare at him fearlessly with those alien yellow eyes, but to him they felt almost friendly now, and he gave each of them a smile and a nod. As the numbers lessened, he slipped from the rock and went back down to the river's edge, kneeling and scooping up the fresh water into his mouth because he'd left his waterskin back in the cave, along with his flute.

His eyes went again to the reeds standing with stiff precision above the river surface, and then he decided, why not? Wading out to where the first stand of plants grew, he felt each one with his fingers, then leaned down and snapped off the firmest one close to where it met the water. It would do, he thought, looking at it critically.

"Lost your flute?" Soi said from behind him, as he tucked it into his belt, and he gave her a rueful smile.

"I...played it when we were attacked in the cave, and it fell. It's probably still back there."

She placed one hand on his shoulder, and though he could not feel her, the gesture was all that was needed. "Take good care of it," she said lightly, though her gray eyes were hard and cold. "You'll need it where we're going."

"I know," he said, and then he saw the white wolf coming towards them and waded back out of the water. His pants and shoes were wet now, but they would dry in the wind.

_It's time to go,_ Ashitare said.

The sun was at their backs now, and at first the journey was pleasant. The rolling of the wolf's gait was familiar to him now, as if he had ridden wolf-back all his life, and he squinted his eyes at the landscapes rushing up towards him and thought of Yui. It was a curious feeling, thinking of her and knowing deep inside that if anything happened to her, he would never forgive himself. It is not your fault, his brain told him patiently, and he replied, yes, I know. But it's not about casting blame now.

Perhaps he should not have let himself become so emotionally attached, but as he thought about it, he wasn't sure it was something he could have prevented. Some things just were, and the feelings he had for Yui, it seemed, just were. When he thought of her sometimes, it was as if they had always been together.

The wind grew chill as the sun began to slip behind the mountains, and the reddish light cast strange shadows on the ground and the air took on a odd, hazy quality, and still the pack ran, not slowing. The wolves surging around him were gray shadows in the darkening twilight, faint whispers of mirage that perhaps were not really there. Maybe he was still dreaming, he thought to himself, and maybe this whole long journey had been a dream and he was even now safely asleep in his bed in his parents' house in Sairou, and when he woke up it would be morning and his father would be waiting for him for the journey into town.

The steady rhythm of the wolf's breathing under him, the pitching motion of the animal's feet, the buzzing of night insects and the hum of the earth...all this was slipping into a waking dream. He felt his eyelids closing, tried his hardest to fight the sleepy daze coming over him, but his body did not seem to want to obey.

"You're getting soft, Aniki," his brother said, and he looked over to see Shun seated on the back of the wolf beside them, legs gripping the animal's flanks and arms crossed teasingly, as if riding even a wolf was no challenge to him.

"It's been a long day," he protested weakly, and Shun laughed.

"You never were the type for travel, anyway."

He smiled back. "I guess not." The last rays of the sun disappeared behind the horizon and he saw that his brother was glowing faintly with a familiar blue light, straw-blond hair and gray eyes highlighted in the dimness, and the sight and scent of him was so worn and comfortable he almost reached over to touch him, to make sure he was real. But the ground underneath was rough and pebbly now, and he did not want to lose his balance.

"Say, Aniki."

"Yes, Shun?"

His brother pointed upward. "Look."

He followed his brother's finger and then realized that it was taking him up beyond the treetops, beyond the distant mountains, and that the night sky was filled with stars, glittering like seaspray across the dark ocean. The sight twisted his heart with an emotion he could not name, and he gasped slightly at the pain and beauty of it all.

"That's me," Shun said, his finger moving slightly across the dark canvas to where a patch of bright stars blazed. "And that's you." Tracing across the constellation with a quick, flicking motion of his fingers. "We're bright tonight. Amiboshi and Suboshi. You used to tell me stories about us when we were little. You were a great storyteller."

"Was I?" he mused quietly. "I don't remember. That was a long time ago."

His brother looked at him with great, sad eyes, the smile flickering from his face, and he wanted to cry. "Have you forgotten about me, Aniki?" he whispered.

He was about to reply, about to open his mouth and say something, though he didn't know what, because there was no satisfactory answer he could give to that question, when the wolf under him gave a great jolt and swerved to one side, and he barely managed to steady his grip around the animal's neck as its gait straightened again. They were slowing, he realized, and his eyelids were heavy and he could not quite see straight, as if he had just awakened from a heavy sleep.

When he looked beside him, there was no one there.

"Amiboshi?"

It was Soi, coming up to him on the white wolf as the pack thudded to a walk, great clouds of steam rising up from their fur in the frosty night air. "We'll stop here for the rest of the night," she said. "The wolves need to rest, and I saw you falling asleep there where you were sitting."

"I'm all right," he murmured, then swayed as his mount stopped and almost fell off. Soi raised both eyebrows at him, and he grumbled something as he dismounted.

There was another river here, though not as wide and not as deep, and as he watched the wolves recreate the watering pattern of earlier in the day, Soi came up to him with a small pouch in her hands. "Here," she said. "You haven't eaten today."

It was a small package of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, cold and a little stale, but he was too hungry to care. She sat by him as he ate it ravenously, gulping it down in huge chunks and not caring that there was rice stuck between his teeth and most likely around his lips. After he had finished, she waited a moment and then said, "I won't be going with you into the city tomorrow."

He had expected that. "That's fine," he said. "I'll see you at the palace?"

She hesitated. "I don't know."

He raised a hand to rub his eyes. "What do you mean, you don't know?" His voice rose, and the words sounded more accusing than he had intended. "What about Yui? What about Nakago?"

"I'm not leaving you behind," she told him coldly. "I have reasons of my own. I will give you directions to one of the entrances at the back gardens, and you can access the palace from there. Once you near the palace grounds, I suspect you'll begin to remember your way around."

"And what if I don't?" he said. "Am I supposed to just wander until I find Yui?"

"Have a little faith in yourself, Amiboshi," Soi snapped, and he jerked his gaze away from her, stared at the river until his eyes burned.

"It's hard to do that," he said, "when I seem to have spent my entire life running away from the past."

He sensed her shift beside him, and then she said, "Did you have another dream about your brother?"

Shun's brilliant smile seemed to light up the night around him, and his eyes went to the sky, to the stars that hung so enticingly close that it seemed he could just touch them if he reached up high enough. _Have you forgotten about me, Aniki?_

"Yes," he said. "I did."

She did not speak again and left him after a while. He took a quick drink of water and then found a satisfactory sleeping spot amid the wolf bodies, warmer than any blanket. Once during the night, he thought he half-woke and saw Soi sitting a short distance away from the wolfpack, with the white wolf paused majestically beside her, the stars framing them in a panoramic backdrop like some heavenly painting. When he woke just before the dawn, the rest of the wolves had awakened and were milling around him in anxious circles. As he sat up, he realized that Soi was gone.

The white wolf came up to him as he stood gingerly, feeling the strain of sore muscles, and he watched as it settled carefully onto its haunches before him. "How far?" he asked, and Ashitare replied, _Not far._

"And Soi?"

The single eye blinked once, slowly and thoughtfully. _She has gone on ahead._

The wolves seemed more jittery this morning than normal, moving with a nervous, choppy gait, and the smell in the air reminded him of the scent rolling off caged animals. He could feel the subtle change in the air now too, a distinct quality that reeked of fear. It could just be the low fog that had moved in during the night and now wrapped softly around them as they rumbled across the land, but he did not think so.

The walls of the capital city were almost invisible through the thick air, but the white wolf was beside him all of a sudden as he looked up and realized that the trees were thinning and through them, he could see the shades of buildings and spires. The pack was slowly now, dropping to an uneasy walk and then an even more uneasy stand-still. His mount lashed its tail through the air behind him, like a whip striking ghosts unseen. He moved his fingers to the rudely-cut reed through his belt, and slid off the wolf's back.

_This is as far as we go_, the white wolf murmured, and he nodded.

"I understand," he said. "Thank you."

The great yellow eye swiveled from him to the city walls and back, and Ashitare said, _Nakago is not one to be taken lightly._

"I understand," he said again. They stood there silently for a while until he finally said, "I must be going."

He turned to the wolf that had carried him on its back for so long, who had saved him there in the cave and had faithfully come so far. There should be some reward, he thought, some prize or even glowing words he should offer, but nothing came to mind. The wolf stared at him for a moment, still panting from the exertion of the run, and then the front forelegs bent and the head dipped, and it bowed to him once more.

"I don't deserve this honor," he told it, and bowed back. As he rose, the cold, wet wolf-nose pressed into the palm of his right hand for the briefest of moments, and then the animal rose and faded into the gray roiling mass that was the rest of the wolf pack, waiting there only for their leader's signal.

_Take care of Seiryuu no Miko_, the white wolf said, _for she is the one who can save us. _

He had turned back toward it, intent on a final word of farewell, or some other piece of advice, but even as he did so the wolf heaved itself up with a great effort, powerful muscles working under the thick white coat, and passed over his head in a single bound. There was barely a whisper of sound, and then the wolf pack was retreating, the gray shadow rippling away from the city walls and withdrawing like a passing cloud. He raised a hand as the last of them faded, held it up long after they were gone, peering into the mist as if by simply doing so he could send his sight to where they ran through the forest and valleys and mountains, the heartbeat of the land.

The road to the city gates was already noisy and very crowded at this hour in the morning, and he was grateful for the fog. He hadn't paid much attention to himself in the past few days, and for the first time he was aware of how disheveled and dirty he must look, and how bad he must smell. He should have taken a bath in the river last night, but that still wouldn't have helped the state of his clothes.

There was no helping that now, he decided, trying to make himself as small as possible and skittering through the gate and under the gaze of the burly soldiers who manned it. Their eyes skimmed over him and moved on, and he breathed a sigh of relief as the crowd thickened around him. The sense of familiarity was eerie, and even as his eyes moved over buildings he had never seen before, it still felt as if he had been here on this street, in this place, many times before.

An attack of déjà vu, he decided, and slipped through the crowd, headed in the direction he knew the palace must be, his feet seeming to choose the road for him as if directed by some invisible compass. He couldn't make out much besides the signs of the buildings nearest to him, and then vague shapes beyond that, and it must be cloudy, because although it was getting light, there was no sun.

The main marketplace seemed to be the popular destination for most of the people around him. He walked through it quickly, feeling his stomach rumble and smelling the food cooking all around him, but he'd left the rest of the pouch of money inside his pack in the cave. He could steal something, he thought, but that would involve the risk of getting caught, and he would never find Yui if that happened.

He had almost reached the other side of the market when he sensed something amiss, a flash of intrusion, like someone had reached out fingers and touched his thoughts, preparing to squeeze. He gave a violent start, bringing all his concentration on that one spot before he realized that the presence was not attacking, but merely searching. If only Soi were here, he thought, but she was not, and he clumsily reached out to try to terminate the connection, or stall whoever was looking for him, or at least to try and block it.

Instead, his mind did something curious, and his stomach made a little flip-flop before he realized everything around him seemed unusually dark and heavy all of a sudden, and he could no longer feel the presence inside his head.

Shaken, he continued onward, trying to keep alert in case the presence returned, but it did not. He felt curiously cut-off, as if he had been blinded. The fog drifted around him, and the crowd was thinning now, people reduced to shadowy shapes and voices raised in disembodied conversation. The feeling of the invisible compass that had guided him since he'd entered the city had vanished, and all the roads looked the same now. He reached a crossroads, took a blind left, and realized that the city around him was silent and that he was alone on the road.

Frustrated, he stopped walking and glanced back, wondering if it was worth it to try and retrace his steps to the marketplace and start again. But something held him back, telling him that no, he did not want to do that, because that was the last point that the mysterious presence had located him, and he would be as good as dead if he returned there.

He had decided that his best bet was to continue the way he was going when he saw something out of the corner of his eye, and as he looked, he saw that it was a light, curiously shaped, burning steadily blue and coming towards him out of the fog.

After the events of the past few days, there was little that could take him by surprise now, and so when the monk-child appeared silently from the mist with the ball of light shining in his palm, he simply raised his hand in a silent hello. The child regarded him for a moment thoughtfully, and then raised a thin arm, pointed to his right. When he looked, he saw an arched gate leading to a broad, empty street.

"I'll follow you," he said.

The streets they passed through were eerily silent, devoid of all human life, with great buildings hulking on both sides of the road like empty shells. He wished he had his cloak, which, as with everything else, had been left in the cave, but there was no helping that now. Rubbing his arms up and down with cold hands, he kept his eyes on the light ahead in the hand of the child, whose almost transparent form seemed to float on the air before him. There was no need to touch this boy to confirm that he was no longer living.

It was strange, he thought as they turned one corner after another, that he had accepted so readily that all of the people important to him in his past were dead now. He wondered how he had known this child before, and how he had died. It did not quite matter, he knew, but the memories crowded in uncomfortably close, and there were still too many fragments of them for him to piece together the whole picture.

"What would you do, Shun?" he wondered softly, keeping his eyes on the glowing orb in the child's hand, watching the wisping of the monk's robes against the small sandaled feet. "I could use your help right now. I don't think I can do this alone."

_I'll be here if you need me, Aniki_, he heard his brother say again, and then the monk-child looked back at him and stopped.

He stopped too, bending down so he could see into the child's face. The boy's eyes were dark and hooded and very old, and he wondered again how they had known each other, for even though the small frame indicated otherwise, he felt somehow that this was no child.

The boy pointed again, and he looked to see that they stood next to a solid rock wall, rising up into the fog, the top of it lost in the swirling clouds. "Is this the palace?" he asked, and even as he did so, even before the boy nodded, he knew that the answer was yes. He reached out one hand and touched the wall, jerking his fingers back at the clamminess of the stone. "I'm not sure I can scale this," he said, and the child smiled and pointed again.

He was sure that the door in the wall had not been there a moment ago, just as he was sure that it would be unlocked and there would be no guard on the other side. The child's smile was mysterious, full of cold secrets, but he didn't feel afraid. "I see," he said, running his eyes around the shape of the entrance seemingly cut from the stone itself in one large slab, and then he looked back at the child. "I can find my way from here. Thank you."

The blue light burned steadily in the small palm, and then the child bowed slightly, eyes never leaving his face, and the lips shaped a word silently, so fleetingly that he was not even sure he had seen it correctly before the light gave a flicker and went out.

_Amiboshi._

He stared into the fog for a moment longer, though he knew he would see nothing. The mental block on his mind cried out to be released, but he squashed it. The presence would return, he knew, avoiding the thought of giving it a name even though he knew who it was that was searching for him, because by stepping through that wall, he could no longer pretend anymore that he had left the past behind.

He pushed open the gate and went in.


	13. Part Thirteen: Yui

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Thirteen: Yui**

Someone was coming down the stairs.

She did not stand as the footsteps neared, feeling the cold stone of the prison bench digging into the backs of her thighs and the sore muscles of her hamstrings. If she was going to face Nakago a second time from the same cell, from behind the same bars, she would at least do it on her own equal ground.

The man who appeared at the foot of the stairs with the lantern in his hand, however, was not Nakago. She remembered him faintly as one of the guards who had escorted her to her old palace room the day Nakago had released her from the dungeons, and she cocked her head a little curiously. This was a new development.

"Yui-sama," the man said, voice echoing strangely through the chilly underground passage. "I trust you are well?"

She did not rise to the bait, keeping her own tone even. "Where is Nakago?" she said.

The man pursed his lips, peering through the bars at her with beady eyes. "The emperor has stated that he will not see you."

"I thought I was brought back here at his command," Yui said flatly. "Surely he'd have the grace to come down to greet his prisoner."

"Don't delude yourself," the guard snapped, and she recoiled inwardly from the disgusting grin he gave her as he thrust the lantern closer. "The emperor has no intention of coming to see you, nor will you be seeing any other visitors. You'll be given food and water and nothing else. The emperor wants you alive, you see, but that's as far as his generosity extends."

"And after that?" she said, crossing her arms and giving the guard her best patient look.

He glared at her. "There is no after," he grated, and his eyes gleamed. "You will die here."

After the man had trouped back up the stairs and the heavy dungeon door had slammed, she fell back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, wondering if she was disappointed. She had certainly not expected much more, but the one thing she had counted on was Nakago's presence as he welcomed her back to Kutou and told her what a fool she had been. One more dangerous enemy eliminated, he would have told her, though how dangerous she was to him, she certainly had no clue.

Or perhaps she did.

Gently drawing the shell out of her pocket, where it had stayed snug and hidden from the eyes of the guards through the long, brutal ride, she placed it on the bench beside her and then passed a hand over her eyes, wincing as her fingers brushed a shallow cut on her cheek. The guards had kept their distance, but for most of the ride she had been simply thrown over the withers of one of the horses like a sack of goods, a rolled up blanket. She was sure she had the bruises to prove it, but in the dim torchlight, all she could see were the dim shadows that were her arms and legs, and then the dusty off-white of the clam shell.

"Tomo," she whispered, but he did not appear.

_How many wishes did you make?_

She did not remember wishing, did not remember anything but bits of blue light and then Suboshi's death, vivid like some grisly, bloody wound that refused to scab over. She did not even remember Soi's death, or Tomo's, or any of the others that had given their lives. It was only Suboshi that kept dying before her eyes, dying over and over again, enveloped in the blue light swirling around them both like a whirlpool of fireflies.

Kaika was not Suboshi, she realized now. There were too many things that had been subtly twisted, as if by looking at Kaika she was looking into a mirror and seeing the man Suboshi could have become, if he had lived. Kaika was to her now a living, breathing person, someone who had cried on her shoulder and in whose arms she had fallen asleep. But Suboshi would always remain just a memory.

"Which is better?" she questioned to no one in particular, as a particularly cold draft swept across the cell from some underground passage, and she shivered. "Either way, I seem to have lost. Neither of them can come with me, in the end."

Her only answer was a small clicking sound, so faint that at first she thought it had simply been her imagination. But the cell seemed to have suddenly shrunk, as if she were no longer the only person occupying the dank, drafty space behind the prison bars, and she glanced abruptly at the clam shell.

It was open.

"Tomo," she said sharply. "Are you there?"

He did not appear out of the shadows, and she could hear nothing except the steady dripping of a trickle of water some ways off, but she felt him as surely as if he had been standing in front of her, painted face smirking at a secret joke only he understood. Fine. If he wanted to play games again, there was nothing she could do about that.

"The thing I want the most," she continued, "is to walk down to the train station in the morning before school and see Miaka there, waiting for me. I've started my day like that for ten years, and it scares me that I might not ever have the chance to do that again."

A whisper from the shadows. She propped her head on her knees and stared into the darkly golden spaces between the bars on the door. "Nakago lied to me about Miaka, didn't he?" she said softly. "Just like he lied to me about everything else that's happened since I arrived here. And like the fool I was, I believed him."

"You weren't a fool," Tomo said. "Not any more than the rest of us, at least."

He spoke from somewhere to her left, where the shadows crowded thick as night, and she imagined him standing there at the far edge of the wall, black hair falling down his back in luminescent waves. "That doesn't make it any better," she told him, and was rewarded by a faint, derisive laugh.

"No," he said. "It doesn't. But at least for you, it is not too late."

"It will be too late if I don't get out of here," she said, pushing herself to her feet and pressing her hands against the thick rods of the door. The metal chilled her hands to the bone and she pulled back, rubbing them against the sides of her dirty skirt, but that did not warm them. "I knew that maybe I would be imprisoned for a while, but I didn't think that Nakago would leave me in here alone to die."

"You haven't learned, I suppose," Tomo said. "Nakago cannot be trusted."

Yui shook her head. "You of all people should understand," she said softly. "I know in my head that I cannot trust Nakago. I know that everything he ever told me was a lie. But when I think of him, it is still like he is the whole universe."

"I loved Nakago," Tomo said, his voice suddenly as brittle as the clam shell that glowed softly under her fingers. "I knew that it was useless of me to do so, but I loved him anyway. I would have moved the earth and the moon for him. I believe if he had asked me to get down on my knees and grovel like a dog, I would have, had the circumstances been right."

"Did Nakago know that?"

Tomo laughed then, the sound so filled with self-loathing that she winced instinctively and thought of the wall of air, a thorny barrier around his heart. "Of course he did."

"Nakago didn't love anyone," she said, wondering at the way her heart twisted at the thought. "It was all just empty words."

A movement from the shadows and she turned to see those amber eyes meeting hers, saw the faint shape of his body through the darkness, and saw him shake his head. "No," he said. "You're wrong."

She frowned, but he did not give her the chance to mull over that before he stepped from his hiding place and glided over to the bars on the door, raising one hand to trace them from top to bottom. He had very white skin, she noticed, and his fingers were slender, almost dainty, like a woman's. She wondered if his skin had always been that white, or if it was a trick of the light on faintly translucent flesh. "These are thick," he said at last, and she bit back a sarcastic comment as he removed his hand and crossed his arms again, staring at the bars pensively, and then turned his head abruptly to stare at her. "How do you feel?"

"What?" she said.

He seemed to look her up and down critically for a moment, as if she was just another one of the bars on the door, and then he said, "I think you'll be all right. It seems to be mostly bruises."

"Tomo, what are you-"

"Pick up the shin," he said in a hard tone that told her arguing was futile. She debated arguing anyway, and then leaned down and cradled the shell in one hand. "Both hands," Tomo said irritably, and she obediently cupped her other hand around it, wondering what he had in mind, waiting for another command as he peered outside at the silent corridor, looking right and then left and then turning back to her.

"No matter what happens," he said, "don't let go."

"Where are you going?" she demanded, but he did not answer as he stepped through the bars of the cell and vanished. The clam shell gave a little shudder in her hand and she swallowed, clamping her elbows tightly against the sides of her chest and staring down at it as it began to sing.

That was the only way she could describe it, she thought, because it was not quite like any sound she had ever heard before. It began as a strange vibrating in the air, and at first she thought it was only the buzzing in her palms connecting with the rest of her body, but then it moved up her arms and through her chest until it was as if the thumping of her heartbeat was just another extension of the pulsing blue light coming from the open shell, trickling upward to her throat and then her mouth, her nose and ears and eyes, and then she could make out almost-notes.

The song whispered to her from the air about her head, and she strained her ears but could not catch anything more than faint echoes, as if the notes were slipping from her grasp almost as soon as she touched them. The clam shuddered in her hand again, and as she began to feel a burning sensation creep down her spine, as if something inside her was on fire, she heard footsteps.

Her first instinct was to panic, but she swallowed it, gritted her teeth against the unpleasant burning feeling that was moving up inside of her to settle in her chest where her heart should be. Fire, she thought dimly, straining her eyes to see through the murky darkness that should have been light because the shell was still glowing, but she could not see it. There was the figure of a man at the door, the shadows trickling around him in liquid vapor, black fire.

As she fell to her knees, she heard the soft click of the prison door swinging open.

"Wake up," a voice said close to her ear, and she gave a start, realizing that she was lying on the prison floor, her cheek to the stone, legs twisted under her as if she had simply slumped to the ground where she sat. She started to struggle upward, but something stopped her and she blinked as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, spots flickering before them as if she had been staring into the sun. Her hands felt frozen in place, fingers interlocked and an object cradled within.

"I didn't drop it," she said, and a face bent down to hers, flawless painted lines of white and black and red and golden eyes sweeping over her with an expression that was not quite gentle, but not as cold as she remembered. For a moment she thought he might be on the verge of some confession, words that might be whispered here in the dark and which they could pretend were never spoken at all.

But all he said was, "The door is open."

She forced her fingers to move, joints creaky and stiff like an old woman's. The still-open shell she placed gently on the floor and pushed herself to her feet on shaky legs, then slipped the shin into her pocket. The door was indeed open, and there was a lumpy sort of thing on the ground beside it. It took her several seconds to realize that the lumpy thing was the shape of a man, and the limp thing extending out from it was an outstretched hand.

"Tomo," she said in horror, and he glared at her again.

"He is not dead," he said, sounding exasperated. "Merely unconscious. I had to borrow his keys for a noble cause."

"Is that why-" she began, and then stopped, thinking back to the almost-song in the air whispering around her as she had stood there in the empty cell and held the clam shell in her hands. There was little Tomo could do on his own, she realized, for he could not touch the guard, nor take the keys and twist open the door, could not even hold his own source of power in his hands. But if there was someone willing to take on that burden, to hold that power...

"Nakago will have sensed something wrong," Tomo said sharply. "We'd best leave while we can."

She followed him out of the prison and up the stairs, conscious only of the sharp echoes of her footsteps against the flagstone, wondering how long it would be until Nakago realized she had escaped his prisons yet a second time. As they reached the landing before the heavy dungeon door, she had the fleeting thought that it might be locked, but it opened smoothly under her touch and they stepped out into the hallway.

Her first thought was that somehow, she had come home. The smoky torchlight, the musty smell of the air, the cavernous ceiling that rose in stately emptiness higher than her eyes could see - all of it reeked with an uneasy familiarity, as if she was seeing an old friend for the first time in many years and could not quite think of the words to say. She would walk down this way, she knew, and then come to the fork in the road, where another hallway filled with pictures beckoned to her, and at the end of that was a door, and behind it was a chamber, and in that chamber would be the man she was searching for.

She gave a gasp, then, her eyes going to Tomo in the dark, and saw that he had known all along.

"I can only show you what you have already known, Seiryuu no Miko," he said softly. "Everything you saw inside my shin was, in the end, merely built from your own memories."

_Nakago-sama, you lied to me._

For a brief moment, she thought she heard his voice again, telling her that she had nothing left, that her best friend had abandoned her to her fate, and her only choice was to follow the path he had given her. But no, that was the past again, and she was here now standing in the bowels of the Kutou palace, armed with only the ghost of a man who had given his life for a cause that had not been hers, and she was going to save him.

"Nakago's waiting," she told him, and was rewarded with the ghost of a smile, and then he turned and pointed down the hall.

"This way, Yui-sama."

The hallway was full of doors. They glided past her like ghosts of their own, wooden doors and metal doors and carved golden doors, all staring at her with blank faces, slipping away into the gloom behind her as she walked onward, but there were always more doors. She wondered if they all led to rooms, and what kind of rooms would be behind some of these, then decided she was better off not knowing. As they passed a curiously shaped door, a high-arched monstrosity of construction carved with images of dragons, all grotesque and bulbous with deformed limbs, she felt a twinge, as if some warning light in her head had been lit.

"Tomo," she said, but he did not look at her, stalking through the darkness silently at her side like a cat. She saw his shoulders tense, the golden eyes narrow.

"He feels you coming to him now," Tomo said.

"But not you?"

The laugh from his lips was curiously low and hissing, like a snake's. "I do not exist, Yui-sama," he said, and laughed again. She shivered. "There is nothing holding me to him. Perhaps I never really truly existed in the first place."

She clenched her fists as his words struck her, and then she stopped walking. "No, Tomo," she said. "That's not true."

The painted face was a ghostly mask in the darkness as he turned a cold profile to her. The torchlight struck him at an odd angle, and from where she stood, she could see that he was faint, insubstantial, that the other side of the hallway and the doors stretching on into the dimness were visible through the trailing edges of the red opera costume. "Don't delude yourself, Yui-sama," he said quietly, and she slowly reached out both hands and touched the place where he should be.

He stared uncomprehendingly at her as her fingers met air, started to speak, and she reached slowly upward, her palms moving across what should have been the skin of his neck, and then his throat, tracing the lips that were not there. The air around his form was dry and cool, a breath of summer wind through a shaded glen, and she closed her eyes, imagining his face beneath her hands and the feel of his wounded body in her arms as they fell through that plane that had been neither dream nor memory.

"You existed," she said, and opened her eyes again to meet his amber ones, and there was such pain there that she wanted to cry, but could not. "All of you existed. I know that to be true."

"Don't lie about what you do not remember," he whispered, and she shook her head.

"This isn't about memory, Tomo. And maybe I would have been happier of if none of you had ever existed, and maybe I would have gone on living my life how I'd always lived it. But it was because of you - because of you and Soi and Suboshi and...even Nakago, that I've come to where I am now."

He smiled faintly with a great effort between her hands. Strangely, the smile lacked the familiar cold edge, and he made no move to step back from her,. "And was all this worth it in the end?"

"The story isn't over yet," she said, "but at the end, I think it will be."

He gave her an unreadable look as the smile faded, but it was not unpleasant, and as she looked into his face, there was something there that was almost akin to hope. "You will change your mind when you see Nakago again," he said, and she shook her head, willing him to understand.

"No matter what happens," she said, "I won't let go."

They stood there for a moment longer, and then she dropped her hands and began to walk again. She sensed him hesitate, and then he followed after her, pacing her, no longer leading the way because the invisible magnetic feeling that had been pulling at her since the first time she had woken up in Kaika's house in Sairou was there again, stronger than ever, and she knew with a certainty the way she must take. Forgive me, Kaika, she thought. I couldn't wait for you after all. I hope you understand.

At the fork in the hallway, she took the rightmost passage.

The clam shell in her pocket was a warm ball of heat against her thigh, and as she moved soundlessly through the passageway, the eyes of the faded portraits seemed to move with her, tracking her footsteps as she passed. It seemed almost natural that she should be drawn to the tapestry of the blue dragon hung there, curiously out of place among the landscapes and portraits of maidens and emperors. Seiryuu no Miko, the dragon seemed to say from where it lay through the roiling painted clouds in all its faded glory, and beside the dragon's woven tapestry there was a door.

As she stepped through, it closed softly behind her even though she did not touch it. The first thing she noticed was that the rough walls of this room rose circular and slanted to the ceiling, like a cavern, and then she saw that at the end of the room was a dais and a chair, and on the chair sat a man. She could see the lamplight glinting off his unbound golden hair as he stood.

"Yui-sama," he said, his voice neutral, and she stopped.

"I've come back, Nakago," she said.

He came down the steps towards her, and as he did so, the feeling of heat and cold welled up in her chest, clenching her heart in its grasp. "It was unwise of you to run away," he told her softly. "Do you realize just how much trouble you have caused me?"

"I don't see," she said, "how my actions are any concern of yours." Her voice sounded far away in her ears as she spoke, and for the first time she realized how silent the room was, and how the floor on which she stood seemed to be a maze of shallow passageways intersecting in dizzying right angles. There was something about water here, she remembered, water and wind.

_Do you know what this room is, Miaka?_

"No," Nakago said coldly. "No, you wouldn't." Blue eyes regarded her for an instant with scorn. "I suppose you think you deserve sympathy, Yui-sama? Or perhaps a prize for making it thus far?"

"I don't want sympathy, Nakago," she said. "All I want is to know why you lied to me. I want to know why you used me and then threw me away. Why you took Miaka away from me. That's why I came back."

From somewhere very far away, she heard a rushing sound, clear and cold and distinct like the gurgling of a mountain stream. Nakago's smile was like ice. "There are no answers, Yui-sama," he said. "It was not I who did the lying, nor was it I who drove your friend away from you. You managed that remarkably well on your own, I thought."

"You lie," she whispered in horror, and the water was louder now, and yet she did not seem to be able to tear her eyes away from his face as he raised one arm, the emperor's robes rustling above the sound of water. "All you ever told me was a lie!"

He did not answer, but even as he stood there before her with the cold blue of his eyes like a closed door, she realized that there was water spilling out from the walls behind him in streams, rushing forth from places between the rocks, filling the twisting passageways around her feet and coiling angrily in clouds of hissing steam through the air, rising above their heads. There was something seated there, she thought dizzily, behind Nakago's chair, a looming shadow of a figure like a coiled serpent, and then she saw that it was not a serpent, but a dragon, and its eyes glowed bright blue.

"You don't belong here, Yui-sama," Nakago said, and she cried out as a blazing light filled the room, pulsing forth from his forehead in the shape of a blue character, painful in its clarity with the sharpness of a thousand knives.

_Heart._

"No," she gasped, stumbling back, but the door behind her was locked and would not open. "Nakago, please. Stop."

The eyes of the dragon were growing now, expanding in her vision until they were two bulbous orbs through the steaming air, like pale moons. She could no longer see Nakago, but the water thundered in her ears like a storm and her heart pounded like it would burst. Was she dying? she wondered almost dreamily, but there was something burning down at her hip that was not a part of the dream, and she fumbled for it, groped with a trembling hand down into her pocket, and then her fingers closed on the clam shell.

She screamed as the sensation pierced her, a raging heat shooting up through her arm and she tried to run and stumbled instead, slipped on the wet flagstones and fell. The thought came to her faintly that there was something very important she had to do. Something important, she repeated to herself, struggling to remember what exactly it was and why she had to hold on to it, even though she might be falling, because she could not afford to lose it, and she heard someone speaking her name.

_Yui-sama_, the voice said. _Yui-sama, look at me!_

She did not want to. "No," she tried to say, but something washed over her like great waves of water, and her eyelids sprang open at the force of it.

She could make out Nakago's form dimly through the steam, the brilliant character pulsing on his forehead like a newly birthed star, his face fixed with a grimace of disbelief. In a daze, she followed his line of sight to her clasped hands, and then she realized that the clam shell was between them, that she had somehow managed to catch it as she fell and that the man kneeling beside her, one arm flung out in front of her, was Tomo.

"Impossible," she heard Nakago breath, and Tomo laughed sharply, the high-pitched, brittle sound of it bouncing off the unseen corners of the cavernous room and breaking into tiny bits like shattered glass.

"There is more than one of us," Tomo spat, "that would like answers, Nakago-sama."

"You're dead," Nakago rasped, but Tomo simply laughed again and flung out his other arm, as if this were just another stage on which he was playing the part of jilted lover, betrayed friend, exiled slave returning for his final vengeance.

She gazed up at him pleadingly, wanting to stop him but not knowing the words, and the amber eyes met hers for the briefest of instants and all the memory came rushing back. She saw his face between her hands, felt his heart beating again as if none of this had ever come to pass and he was as real and substantial and living under her touch as any human being. His eyes hardened, then, and she shuddered at the desperation of his voice inside her mind.

_Whatever happens, don't let go._

There was no fear as she felt herself falling again, the shell in her outstretched hands like a final offering. She smelled something burning, and as she raised her head, she found that her arms were bound and she could not move, could not even struggle. The burning smell wafted toward her on the wind, stronger than before. The village. The village was burning.

But that couldn't be right, because the village had already been burned to the ground long before, and now she was alone. Help me, she tried to say, but the words would not come. There were people on all side, crowding, pushing, but she could not see them. The only one in the room was him, and she had sensed him even before the doors had opened and she had lifted her head to see him standing there, golden hair bound back, those clear blue eyes as honest and beautiful as she remembered.

"Taria," he said, and she smiled at him and saw his heart break. He had always worn his emotions too close to the surface, but that was part of why she loved him.

_I'm sorry for leaving you alone like this._

And a voice, ugly in its hatred, shouting, "Kill the girl!"

There were hands on her arms, but she did not care, only wanting to look into those blue eyes until she could no longer see, until she drew her last breath, drowing in them as ice-cold mountain lakes, the bluest, purest pearls in the all the world. "Taria!" he gasped, and she imagined herself reaching for him to wipe away his tears, because such beautiful eyes should not have to know the meaning of sorrow.

_Ayuru. Live._

"TARIA!"

The burning was acute in her nostrils now, and the charred smell was the smell of burning flesh, sparks of flame leaping at the corners of her vision in a bizarre dance, and she could still see him stretching out one hand to her through his desperate tears, and a dazzling light filling the room as bright as the sun and as blue as his eyes. She could reach him, she knew, if she just struggled hard enough, could break her hands free of the bonds after all and run down the stairs to him, fling her arms around him and they would be together then as if they were the only two people left alive in the world.

And then the fire reached her, and she screamed.

There was still something in her hands, a clam shell, though she did not remember exactly why she was holding a clam shell. She brought her hands to her chest through the flame as it burned its way through the air around her and the next breath she drew was fire and smoke. There was no pain. Perhaps she was already dead, and the sensation she felt was only sorrow as she watched the fire burn the husk of her body away. She would not need it as a ghost, she thought, and then she almost remembered there was something important about ghosts.

_Yui-sama._

"Who's there?" she whispered.

_Do you really think_, she heard Nakago say, _that she came back just for you?_

She turned around slowly and saw him standing there. He was dressed in the shogun's armor again, metal fastenings glimmering in the dim candlelight of the room, and something about the way he looked at her caught her eye, raised the warning flag in her mind that she did not want to recognize, and so she didn't. There is something important, the fleeting thought whispered to her, something you cannot afford to lose.

But his eyes drew her and then held her. For the first time, she noticed how blue they were.

"Ayuru?" she said, and he froze.

_You have three wishes. You will give me one wish._

"I gave you one wish," she heard herself say gravely. There was a creeping itching sensation moving up her arms, and she watched, fascinated, as the skin of her hands hardened, crystallized into blue and silver scales. "And you wasted it."

"I did not waste it!" he snapped. "You deluded yourself by thinking that you held your power over me. Haven't you realized yet that you were merely a part of the plan?"

"Ayuru," she said again gently, and his face crumpled for an instant, eyes wide and glazed as if by looking at her, he was seeing a ghost. And then the mask snapped back into place and his hands were on her shoulders, shaking her till her teeth rattled.

"You will give me your third wish."

"No," she said, feeling that it was very important that she told him no, even though she did not know quite what he meant, because she had had three wishes, and they were all gone. Seiryuu no Miko, Tomo had called her. "Haven't you had enough of death, Nakago? Haven't enough people died because of you?"

His only answer was a tightening of his grip, but she heard the words as clearly as if he had shouted them so that they echoed around the cavern over the thundering water. I never meant for that to happen, the little boy said, and the last piece of memory clicked into place.

She had summoned the god after all. After Amiboshi had been lost, after Ashitare had sacrificed himself for a jeweled trinket, and Tomo and then Miboshi had vanished and Suboshi had tried to save her, the ryuuseisui piercing through his body in a shower of blood, and then Soi had died. There had been too much death. The boy with the beautiful eyes was weeping, trapped inside the man who held her captive as the clam shell pulsed inside her closed, dragon's hands.

"He's correct, Yui-sama," someone said. "You still have one more wish."

"Miaka?" she whispered, but the voice was too low for Miaka's. She could not see through the smoke and the fire, and Nakago's grip on her shoulders was painful as the shell gave a mighty twist and lurched in her hands. She gasped, fearing she would drop it, as it gave one great burst of heat, spinning the room around her, and she found she was backed up against the door of the chamber, Nakago's hands still on her shoulders.

"Let go of her!" the voice commanded.

To her shock, Nakago's hands dropped away. He was turning now, moving almost unwillingly to face the one standing behind him under the shadow of the dragon. The little boy was suddenly there again, gazing out of his eyes with all the childish innocence bubbling to the surface, and she almost wept. The roar of the water flooding from the walls of the chamber in mighty waterfalls was only an echo of her own heartbeat, and she saw that the person standing on the dais by the emperor's chair was Soi.


	14. Part Fourteen: Kaika

_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Fourteen: Kaika**

In his memory, the Kutou palace gardens were a rare thing of beauty, exotic vines weaving their luxurious fringes through contorted tree limbs, delicate flowers strewn almost carelessly across living water that puddled and tinkled into vast, crystal pools. There was none of that now as Kaika carefully closed the door behind him, hearing a small snick as it clicked back into the wall. He jerked his head at the noise, and in that one brief glance he saw the door was no longer there.

Mysterious disappearing doors or ghost-child monks had hardly fazed him, but as he stood there in front of the doorless wall, he realized that he'd half- hoped the gardens at least would still be as he remembered.

No one had looked after this place for some time. The pools were all dry, choked with dirt and weeds. The trees had grown to monstrous heights, black branches stabbing the sky with bare fingers. Unpruned swaths of vine swallowed what could be seen of the lower trunks; higher up, dead leaves fluttered in the gray wind. Kaika bent and touched the cracked stone path under his wolf-stained sandals, and as he did so the wind swirled in eddies between his toes, whipping past him the last remains of flower petals.

He caught one of them between his fingers, but it crumbled to dust.

With an effort he got to his feet, clamping down firmly on the corner of his mind that tried to cry out in anguish, wondering how, who, why. There was only one answer to the question, he knew, and he couldn't afford to think about that answer right now.

His feet took him in a slow daze around the edge of the old flower garden, through a ruined maze of tiered pool beds, to the foot of the old wooden bridge spanning the dried remains of the garden's central lake. Kaika stepped gingerly onto the first plank, testing. It held. There was no evidence of rot anywhere within these walls, he realized as he made his slow way up the bridge to its highest point, grasping the faded rails still bearing traces of its original brilliant red coating. Everything was merely very dry.

He coughed on the dust as he stopped, staring down into what used to be rippling water, now cracked earth. _Shun_, he thought. _I had to go. That's the way it had to be. I'm sorry._

"You did the right thing," his brother said softly from behind him, and Kaika didn't turn around, simply smiled. "I'm glad you went. If you hadn't, maybe we would have all been killed."

Kaika gripped the rail. "Am I alive now?" he wondered. "I'm not so sure."

There was a cool touch against his cheek, the faintest hint of a breeze. "I'll be here if you need me, Aniki," his brother said, and the presence was gone.

The path wound around several tall stands of what most likely used to be ornately pruned shrubs, now reduced to a matted mass of weeds. He skirted them, hearing his shoes crunch against pebbles coming loose from the walkway, turned the next curve to what used to be the back entrance to the palace.

The double golden doors had not only been locked, but he could see wooden beams tacked securely across their width, and the gate leading from the garden to the doors over a pebbled footbridge that once arched gracefully over rushing waters had also been locked and barred. Vines crept through crumbling holes, brown and dusty. Kaika hesitated. He could climb over the wall, but it was high, and he withdrew his hand with a slight yelp as he tried to touch the wall itself; the vines, he saw as he looked closer, were embedded with tiny thorns.

There was something about bridges, he thought to himself absently, sticking one sore finger in his mouth and tasting the tartness of his own blood. Something about bridges, that girl in the red and white gown who had been calling to him. There had been water under him and sky above him, and all he had to do was let go, and he thought of something else then, that he had been grasping his flute as she tried to save him.

His flute, he thought with a sudden jolt and pulled it from his belt, placing the rough mouthpiece to his lips.

He had no particular melody in mind as the first notes wafted into the grey air. He thought instead of water, of a brown-haired girl in red and white ceremonial garb and her tears, of green and growing things. He thought of Shun, his brother's voice and the touch of a small hand, of Sairou and his parents waiting faithfully day after day for him to come home. He didn't know when he had started to cry, only realized it when he felt wetness on his cheeks, his face, a touch of a tendril on his mouth-

It was raining.

His eyes flew open.

He stumbled backward, almost dropping his flute as he dashed one hand across his mouth where the vine had crept up and began to wrap itself around him. But not just one vine â€" there were hundreds of them now, creeping across the courtyard in brilliant lines of growing green, wrapping themselves around the rails of the dry bridge, curling across the shuttered palace doors, rushing through the holes in the wall, through the cracks in the garden gate.

Before he could draw another breath, to ready himself or perhaps to scream, the vines tightened on the already straining wood and stone beams holding the gates upright, held taut for a split second, and then the wall shattered.

Kaika ducked instinctively, one arm flung up over his head. Splinters and sharp pieces of rocks pelted through the air. He dropped to a crouch, bracing against the impact.

_There's no time to waste, aniki_, the voice whispered, and he did not hesitate, didn't look to see where he was going, simply clenched his flute in his free hand and dashed forward.

His feet hit solid ground and he pounded through the dust cloud, eyes shut tight. He expected at any moment to feel the shock of slamming into something solid, a wall or a door, but there was nothing, just dry air stinging his lungs as he ran staggeringly on. There was echoing around him, above him, through him, and he gasped for breath as his legs gave out under him and he collapsed to the ground, panting.

When he opened his eyes, he found that everything around him was utterly, completely dark.

He fought the bubbling panic. He couldn't have run far, he reasoned to himself, and he was still clutching the flute so hard that his palms hurt. Relaxing his grip, he balanced the instrument on one unseen knee and pushed himself up to a sitting position. The air smelled musty, like the air of a room that had not seen the light in a long, long time. The floor was smooth, tiled...marble?

_I'm inside the Kutou palace_, he thought with a curious sense of frightened delight, and with that thought his knee jerked slightly and his flute fell to the ground.

He heard it roll just to a short distance away, but his fingers scrabbled blindly at the marbled floor and touched nothing. The panic began bubbling again and he pushed it down ruthlessly. Blinking his eyes rapidly, he wondered if he had truly gone blind, but there was a slightly bluish quality to the air that was not quite light but not quite dark either, and he could almost make out the outlines of his fingers when he put one hand up to his face.

Another memory came creeping back, of him alone in a room waiting for Yui to return, a blue light, and a clam shell-

He breathed out sharply, and was rewarded by a faint bluish glow in the space where his breath had vanished.

Pushing himself to his feet, he swallowed, focusing this time on the immediate space around him. When he blew out the stream of air this time, it was bright, concentrated, and through its glittering sparks, he saw his flute laying no more than an arm's length to the right from where he had been sitting. He bent down and picked it up, noticing absently that the air was lighting up now as he exhaled, a dim but steady glow that took longer to fade than his initial experiments.

"That'll be fine," he whispered to the echoing palace walls, blowing out a long sigh that bloomed like muted fireworks, rolling slowly across the floor and up the pillared walls. Everything was blue. He didn't know if that was because of the odd quality of the light or if this room had always been blue â€" because it was a room, Kaika saw â€" with a door at one end, high ceilings painted with faded, contorted frescoes. He glanced back from where he had come, but the light did not reach, and there was only an endless black tunnel.

He took another deep breath and let it out again, and as he turned his eyes to the door, he noticed that there was a peculiar quality about this light in the space next to him, as if there was almost a tracing of an outline, like a body...

"We'd better get going," his brother said to him, "or we'll be too late."

Kaika closed his eyes and then opened them. The outline was still there.

"What," Shun chided him gently. "You don't believe in me?"

"That's not what I meant," he began, and then stopped as a warm hand found his and squeezed his fingers slightly.

"Yui-sama's in danger," Shun said. "And we're the only ones who can save her now."

He didn't ask how his brother knew this. Instead he grasped the unseen hand tightly, feeling it as warm and solid as any flesh-and-blood, and led his twin across the floor to the single door set unassumingly amid the swirling paintings of Kutou's dragon god.

It swung open at their approach and he crossed through the low arch, exhaling deeply again to illuminate the hallway beyond. It twisted out of sight beyond the light of his breath, but the same grotesque, strangely fascinating paintings that had decorated the walls were hung here within dusty, ornate picture frames.

"What is this place?" he wondered, and his brother replied, "It's the part of Nakago's heart that we never see."

He tightened his grip on his flute in one hand and Shun's warm palm in the other, concentrating on moving forward, one foot in front of the other. The air was musty and he almost sneezed, fighting back the twitching of his nose and glancing downward at the floor to clear his eyes, and stopped.

"Footprints?" he whispered.

His brother didn't answer and he bent down, reaching out with the hand that held his flute, the floor glowing blue at his approaching breath. The prints were small, barely disturbing the layer of dust that coated the marble floor, not small enough to be a child's prints but not large enough for a man's.

"Yui's been here," he said with certainty, and something made him look up, to the left, at the painting hanging on the wall there. As with the room behind them, perhaps it was his breath that made it glow blue, or maybe it had always been blue, a mass of spiral cloud and smoke shapes that made no sense to his questioning eyes - but it caught the attention and held it.

"Shun?" he said.

"Take a step back," his brother said quietly.

A river, he thought as he backed up, but no, the chaos was too ordered to be a river, four limblike shapes stretching from the blue expanse, and he turned his head further to the right, following the mass of blue to where it reached a thorny forehead, bulbous eyes, a gaping maw of a massive dragon.

He stumbled back, and there was a burst of something in front of his eyes, a mental explosion. The world went light, then dark, then light again, and he faintly heard his brother shouting, "Aniki!" and then someone else speaking, perhaps through memory or perhaps words, far away.

_The first wish was for the sealing of Suzaku._

There was a scream, perhaps Shun's or perhaps his own, and the ground shook. His only thought was for his flute as he collapsed backward against the throbbing in his brain.

_The second wish was for the return of the Suzaku no Miko to her own world._

_Get up, aniki._

"I can't," he gasped, and the pressure on his hand tightened, becoming a feeble jerking on his arm.

_Aniki, please. Aniki, get up._

He gave a hoarse cry and heaved himself off the ground, toward the faint blue form before him, not realizing that beyond that was the wall and set into the wall were two gold doors. He had no time to stop before his head slammed into one of them, and there was the explosion again, except on a smaller scale because this time it was mostly physical. The doors groaned and he stumbled through on shaky legs, hitting the ground as he realized that someone was screaming.

"Kaika!" someone cried, and he forced his head to move, forced one arm under his body. It was wobbly and the world spun as he focused, on the black boots that turned into a tall man in emperor's robes as he looked up, the yellow-haired girl slumped against one wall, bleeding heavily from the forehead, the red-haired woman standing on the dais as if she was holding court.

"The third wish," Soi said, her eyes fixed on his as he met her gaze through the throbbing pain in his head, "was to have been Nakago's, for power over the world of the miko. But it was never given!"

For one split second, the world stopped, and it was just he and Nakago in the room, with the rush of water cascading across the stones just like that day he had almost died, and the ghost of a blue-eyed memory saying - _Amiboshi, you will go to Konan-koku._

"You shouldn't have come back, Amiboshi," Nakago said.

And then he felt something cold pierce through him, a pair of hands that were not his with a weapon that was not his either. The ryuuseisui whistled through the air, and he cried out with someone else's voice, "Leave my brother alone!"

Nakago smiled. The blast from his hands hit the wall behind Kaika, but the ryuuseisui sped away nimbly, whipping back and forth dizzyingly, taunting. Shun, he thought desperately, and then calmer, looking past Nakago to where Yui stood supporting herself against one wall, eyes hard and determined, one hand outstretched. He did not need to look closer to know that she was holding a small clam shell.

He could hear his brother sobbing if he listened too closely, a sound that seemed to come from deep inside him, a tearing of the heart. "Yui," he gasped, and he didn't meant to cry but he was crying anyway, begging her with his eyes to understand. "Yui, I was too late. I'm sorry! Yui, I'm sorry!"

She held out to him the hand that cupped the clam shell, took a step closer, and he suddenly saw that her hands were no long human, but clawed and scaled, silver-blue. Nakago's next energy blast flung him back against the far wall. He felt something wet lap at his toes and looked down, expecting to see blood. But instead he saw that the blast had also broken one of the basin walls, and the pool of water was trickling outward. Nakago held out a hand and he could feel the energy gathering there, felt his brother pull the ryuuseisui to respond, whistling through the air and wrapping around Nakago's wrists, quicker than sight.

Nakago jerked back, pulling Kaika with the motion. The broken pieces of tile sliced into his skin and he saw Yui running, gesturing urgently with one hand. The water lapping around his legs was tinted red now, and he could feel Shun's energy draining through the bond, but the ryuuseisui held. He tried to bring his flute to his lips with arms that felt heavy as lead. "Kaika!" Yui screamed.

She was so near, if he could only reach out one hand to touch her - he could see her panicked eyes, the cut on her forehead, the torn hem of her skirt. If only I hadn't lost you in the rain, he thought fuzzily, if only I'd tried harder, I wouldn't have failed you. His brother tightened his grip on the ryuuseisui as he struggled just to breathe, knowing that if he lost consciousness, it was over.

_Amiboshi._

He blinked through his foggy vision, but it was not Nakago and it was not Yui, or Soi. "Help..." he whispered, and whoever it was laughed. He felt warmth creep around him, between his toes, up his chest, a gentle summer breeze kissing his face.

_Whatever happens, don't let go._

Yui's hand touched his, scaly and rough, and something small and cold folded into his palm as she intertwined their fingers tightly together, and before he could gasp out another apology, she kissed him.

The room disappeared and he was spinning downwards into an endless abyss of black. The wind whistled past his face, harsh and shrill and freezing like tiny drops of ice, but Yui's body and lips were warm against him, her fingers still holding onto his for more than her life, and that tiny, hard shell sandwiched between them.

"Are we dying?" he whispered against her lips, and she shivered.

"You came back," she said in response. He felt his brother stir at her words, like another part of his consciousness, and wasn't sure which one of them she was speaking to. Perhaps it didn't matter now.

_Yui-sama, I promised._

But no, it was daylight, and he could feel the breeze tickling the back of his neck as he pounded down the cobblestoned street. There was the smell of fear in the air, the sound of feet behind him, shouting. He couldn't stop, he knew. He didn't know why he was running, who he was running from, just that he had to keep going because if he did not, they would catch him, and if they caught him, he would never see Shun again.

"Stop! Chiriko! Stop!"

Chiriko?

The sound of rushing water filtered slowly into his hearing and he turned down a side street, feeling his flute slippery with sweat between ice -cold fingers. The bridge reared up in front of him, a few paces between him and freedom, and Kutou.

Something slammed into him from behind. He reeled, tottered unsteadily as sparks flashed before his eyes, stumbled backwards, tried to jam his foot into the ground behind him before he realized there was no ground. The river swirled hungrily beneath him and his desperate, scrabbling fingers found the railing of the bridge.

"Chiriko," said the maiden in the beautiful red dress and the beautiful brown eyes, so beautiful, so sad, and her voice was full of despair and longing and something else he could not name. He could feel his fingers slipping. The rock was too wet, the river too high and hungry after the long rains. "Your music is so lovely...you don't need to use it like this!"

_You don't understand_, he wanted to tell her, to laugh, to catch hold of her hand and tell her that it was not true, it was all a bad dream and soon they would wake up. The fingers of his left hand crept upward, caught on some bits of loose brick, and even as he tried frantically to regain his hold, he knew it was too late.

The river roared beneath him, so close, so welcoming. He squeezed his eyes shut against the splash of the icy water, but there was a jolt as something - someone - grasped the other end of his flute.

The reed will break, he thought, opening his eyes, but it did not break after all, and even before he saw her he knew it was the maiden in the red gown, and he remembered that the something else in her eyes that he could not name before was called love.

"Don't do this, Chiriko. You don't need to hurt anyone. You don't have to play the flute to hurt anyone."

He smiled at her and heard the voice, that other voice, over her words.

_Amiboshi. You will go to Konan-koku._

"I'm sorry, Miaka," he breathed, and this time as he let go, he did not close his eyes as he fell. She was crying. So was he, he found as he hit the water, taking one last breath before the waves closed over his head and the cold shock of the icy river froze his limbs so he could not even have swum to the surface if he had wanted to. I'm drowning, he thought, but the thought seemed very far away. Someone else was crying too, but it was very near, much nearer than the distant thought of death.

_I'm sorry!_ he sobbed. _I'm sorry! I wasn't strong enough. I couldn't. I can't. I had to let go, don't you see?_

Arms closed around him and he felt the water carrying him away, a rushing of bubbles close to his face washing away the tears. When he closed he eyes he saw the maiden in the red gown, as vivid as if she had been painted onto the insides of his eyelids. Miaka, he thought. Her name is Miaka, and the presence beside him said, I know.

His eyes flew open as Yui kissed him again, the long, shuddering contact jolting through his body, and between their fingers, clutched tightly, he could still feel the ridged clam shell. Water swirled around them, pulsing bright, pure blue, and he realized that he had no need to breathe as Yui drew away at last and they stared at each other in wonder through the blue hazy glow.

"Nakago followed Miaka to her - our - world," Yui said. "I remember the rest now - the rest of the story. I should have stopped him, but I didn't. I was weak."

Kaika said, "But you're stronger now." The clam shell thrummed with power through his fingers. He felt Yui shaking ever so slightly.

"Soi told me," Yui said finally, "that I still have one wish left."

For a moment Kaika allowed himself to feel his hopes crashing down around him, allowed himself to finally confront the fact that she was of another world after all, and in the end, she could not stay. "What will you wish for, then?" he said finally, drawing her to him. She rested her head against his chest.

"For a long time," she said, "I thought I hated Miaka, I thought she hated me as much as I hated her. I thought she'd abandoned me."

_You couldn't know the truth, Yui-sama_, Shun said quietly. _It wasn't your fault._

"I made myself believe she would raise up a kingdom to fight against me because Nakago told me so. I thought she'd call her god to destroy me. So I vowed to destroy her first."

"I don't think Miaka was like that," Kaika said, and Yui shook her head.

"Miaka was too innocent," she said, "and so was I." She paused. "Nakago's killed her, you know? I couldn't save her in the end, so he killed her. Miaka, and all her seishi, and everyone she loved. They're all dead too. I watched them die.""

"Yui-"

She laid a finger on his lips, and he blew out a long, deep, quiet breath. A blue trail of air wisped around them, curling around Yui, caressing her face, her shoulders, wrapping around her waist, and disappeared. "I have to go," she said. "I have to set things right."

Kaika swallowed. "I know."

He held her at arms' length for a moment, and afterwards he could never be sure if she had initiated it or he had, but somehow he found her arms tightly around him and his around her, the beating of her heart quick against his chest, the clam shell still clenched between their intertwined fingers, and the voice of his brother in his ears.

_Aniki, it's time._

"I love you," he breathed, or maybe it was Shun's voice, or maybe it was both of them, but he felt her smile once more against his lips as she drew a deep breath, as the word reverberated from her lips through the water and they rose from the depths like the rushing of a wave, in a coil of blue light and foaming water like an ocean storm in the wake of a dragon's roar.

_Kai...jin._.


	15. Part Fifteen: Yui

ï»¿_Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**Sonzai (Existence)  
Fifteen: Yui**

"Taka and I are going to the movie tonight," Miaka said, "if you've changed your mind."

Yui glanced out the window, at the early summer sun slanting through the trees and the rings of black smoke from the 18-wheeler roaring by on the new freeway by the school. "It's no wonder they're sending out alerts for global warming," she muttered.

"Yui-chan!"

"Can't," she said automatically, reaching for her books. "I need to run some errands for mom after English club, and then I have tutoring."

"Two tickets," Miaka said, ignoring her, dropping the colorful, glossy scraps of paper on her desk. "Bring Tetsuya if you want."

"We're not dating-" She blinked as one small hand darted in and caught hold of hers. "Miaka, I really am too busy to-"

"You take care of yourself, Yui-chan. OK?"

Yui blinked again, but Miaka smiled at her and released her hand with a laugh. "We'll be at Ikebukuro station, east entrance, seven o' clock if you change your mind. Give me a call or something if you'll be bringing Tetsuya and I'll tell Taka to be on his best behavior."

"Thanks," Yui said simply, and Miaka gave her a wave, disappearing around the doorframe like a tiny typhoon. The 18-wheeler had long gone when she turned to look out the window again, replaced by a motorcycle gang and three trucks that looked like they had seen better days.

There was a slight breeze cutting through the thick Tokyo summer humidity outside, and she shed her blazer as she left the school grounds, loosening her hair from its tight ponytail and fastening it against the nape of her neck. The train was packed, but she didn't mind so much, staking out a small corner by the door. A few older ladies shuffled on, a few schoolboys she didn't know shuffled off. The sun was setting.

At the next station she was watching the doors shut absently when she felt something fluttering around her face. She waved one hand to brush it away, assuming it was a fly or mosquito of some sort, or one of those ugly long-legged bugs that always made Miaka scream and dash into the next room, yelling _Kill it, Yui-chan, kill it!_

As she lowered her hand, she saw with a start that a blue butterfly had alighted on her fourth finger.

She held her breath, but it did not stir, simply perched there as if it was the most natural thing in the world. None of the other passengers seemed to notice, not even the businessman leaning heavily against the railing beside her, eyes drifting closed and jerking open as the train rocked from side to side. The butterfly's antennae twitched slightly, but the beautiful blue wings stayed perfectly still.

"Ochanomizu," the conductor drawled over the intercom, muffled by the scuffling of shoes on the train floor, the zipping and unzipping of bags. "Ochanomizu. Doors open on the right."

The butterfly stirred as the doors creaked open, and Yui watched it breathlessly for a moment before it leapt lightly from her finger and fluttered through the doors. Follow it! her brain screamed, but the practical part that seemed to be more Hongou Yui than the rest of her said, don't be an idiot.

"Doors are now closing," the pleasant recorded voice said, and she shoved the practical part aside, grabbed her bag, shoved through the doors as they slammed shut.

The outside of the station was bland, nondescript, a few streets of shops. She'd never been to this part of town. The sun seemed hotter here. She shifted her blazer to her other arm, slung her bag from her shoulder, and wondered if she should just get back on the train when something fluttered past her and she turned to watch the butterfly hovering in the air.

"Lead on," she said to it, feeling slightly foolish.

The butterfly hovered a second more, then beat its wings in a flurry of motion, launching itself down a side street to the left. Yui bit her lip and broke into a slight jog, barely following the jeweled wings in the glare of the almost setting sun. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked. The sound startled her and she did not see the broken tile, caught her foot and stumbled, catching herself in time as her bag broke her fall.

When she looked up, the butterfly was gone.

"Great, Yui," she grimaced. Nothing seemed broken, though she might have a good bruise on her knee for the next week, from the look of things. The dog barked again, sounding closer, and as she pushed herself to her feet she saw it trotting toward her.

It was a large dog, larger than any dog she'd seen in the city in a long time, white-furred with a coat much too thick for the Tokyo summer heat. The snout, she saw as it came nearer, did not quite look like that of a domesticated dog, not anything like the poodles or labradors popular among the upper-class. In fact, it looked quite like-

It stopped in front of her, huge and white and sleek, its single yellow wolf-eye gazing up at her perfectly serene and knowing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The scar over where its other eye should have been was vividly red and raised.

"Hello," Yui said. The word sounded foolish in her own ears.

The wolf-dog rumbled low in its throat, then turned its back and began padding away silently. There did not seem to be any choice, so she followed it.

The road curved to the right, widened, then narrowed. The houses and shops along its sides were silent, hidden behind elegantly pruned shrubs and high, forbidding gates. She followed the wolf-dog past a stop sign, as the road wound up a hill, then down again, passed a tiny park and then ended at the gate of a small temple.

The wolf-dog stopped and she stopped too. It looked expectantly at her and she at it, and as they stared at each other, the breeze picked up and she heard faintly the sound of flute music.

Her skin prickled and she turned to go in, turned around again, wanting to say something, though she didn't know what. But the wolf-dog was not there, and the flute music drifted faintly to her again on the wind.

She jogged through the grounds, feeling a bit sacreligeous, but there was really no point in dwelling on that now. She saw him on a bench at the far side of the outlying buildings, his back to her, the familiar reed flute lifted to his lips, and she knew it was him although his clothing was no longer the clothing of Sairou and she could not see his face. Slowing to a walk as she drew near, she tried to make her footfalls as quiet as possible, but the music stopped as she reached the bench, and he put his flute down gently on his knee. She sat down beside him.

Neither of them said anything, watching the sun setting behind the trees, huge and orange-red so it looked like everything was on fire. When Yui finally turned to him, she saw he was already looking at her, the beautiful, familiar eyes full of the words he could not say.

"Kaika-" she said, then stopped, choked, not sure if that was even right. He caught hold of her hand.

"You came back," he said, and smiled.

_That book wasn't evil.  
It was the most wonderful story I have ever read._

**19 July 2006**


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